Best 85 quotes of Stephen Leacock on MyQuotes

A barber is by nature and inclination a sport. He can tell you at what exact hour the ball game is to begin, can foretell its issue without losing a stroke of the razor, and can explain the points of inferiority of all the players, as compared with the better men that he has personally seen elsewhere, with the nicety of a professional.

About the only good thing you can say about old age is, it's better than being dead!

Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better.

All Dickens's humour couldn't save Dickens, save him from his overcrowded life, its sordid and neurotic central tragedy and its premature collapse. But Dickens's humour, and all such humour, has saved or at least greatly served the world.

A lone maple leaf resting on sand Have you ever been out for a late autumn walk in the closing part of the afternoon, and suddenly looked up to realize that the leaves have practically all gone? And the sun has set and the day gone before you knew it, and with that a cold wind blows across the landscape? That's retirement.

Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances on the concertina, will admit that even suicide has its brighter aspects.

Any man will admit if need be that his sight is not good, or that he cannot swim or shoots badly with a rifle, but to touch upon his sense of humour is to give him mortal affront.

Any two meals at a boarding-house are together less than two square meals.

As for politics, well, it all seemed reasonable enough. When the Conservatives got in anywhere, [Judge] Pepperleigh laughed and enjoyed it, simply because it does one good to see a straight, fine, honest fight where the best man wins. When a Liberal got in, it made him mad, and he said so,-not, mind you; from any political bias, for his office forbid it,-but simply because one can't bear to see the country go absolutely to the devil.

A silk dress in four sections, and shoes with high heels that would have broken the heart of John Calvin.

Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets.

Being a specialist is one thing, getting a job is another.

Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.

Chess is one long regret.

Each section of the British Isles has its own way of laughing, except Wales, which doesn't.

Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it.

Golf may be played on Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.

Hockey captures the essence of Canadian experience in the New World. In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold, hockey is the chance of life, and an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.

How can you shorten the subject? That stern struggle with the multiplication table, for many people not yet ended in victory, how can you make it less? Square root, as obdurate as a hardwood stump in a pasturenothing but years of effort can extract it. You can't hurry the process. Or pass from arithmetic to algebra; you can't shoulder your way past quadratic equations or ripple through the binomial theorem. Instead, the other way; your feet are impeded in the tangled growth, your pace slackens, you sink and fall somewhere near the binomial theorem with the calculus in sight on the horizon.

How strange it is, our little procession of life! The child says, "When I am a big boy." But what is that? The big boy says, "When I grow up." And then, grown up, he says, "When I get married." But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to "When I'm able to retire." And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone.

Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.

Humour in its highest reach mingles with pathos: it voices sorrow for our human lot and reconciliation with it.

Humour is essentially a comforter, reconciling us to things as they are in contrast to things as they might be.

I admit that when the facts are not good enough, I always exaggerate them.

I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

I am what is called a professor emeritus—from the Latin e, 'out,' and meritus, 'so he ought to be.

I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.

If every day in the life of a school could be the last day but one, there would be little fault to find with it.

If I were founding a university I would begin with a smoking room; next a dormitory; and then a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had more money that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text books.

In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.

In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages ... so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversation.

Indeed I have always found that the only thing in regard to Toronto which faraway people know for certain is that McGill University is in it.

In earlier times they had no statistics and so they had to fall back on lies. Hence the huge exaggerations of primitive literature, giants, miracles, wonders! It's the size that counts. They did it with lies and we do it with statistics: but it's all the same.

In point of morals, the average woman is, even for business, too crooked.

It is difficult to be funny and great at the same time. Aristophanes and Moliere and Mark Twain must sit below Aristotle and Bossuet and Emerson.

It is to be observed that 'angling' is the name given to fishing by people who can't fish.

It may be those who do most, dream most.

It was Einstein who made the real trouble. He announced in 1905 that there was no such thing as absolute rest. After that there never was.

I've seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.

Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.

Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.

Men are able to trust one another, knowing the exact degree of dishonesty they are entitled to expect.

Modern critics, who refuse to let a plain thing alone, have now started a theory that Cervantes's work is a vast piece of "symbolism." If so, Cervantes didn't know it himself and nobody thought of it for three hundred years. He meant it as a satire upon the silly romances of chivalry.

Most people can tire of a lecture in fifteen minutes, clever people can do it in five, and sensible people don't go to lectures at all.

Most people tire of a lecture in ten minutes; clever people can do it in five. Sensible people never go to lectures at all. But the people who do go to a lecture and who get tired of it, presently hold it as a sort of grudge against the lecturer personally. In reality his sufferings are worse than theirs.

Newspapermen learn to call a murderer "an alleged murderer" and the King of England "the alleged King of England" in order to avoid libel suits.

On the same bill and on the same side of it there should not be two charges for the same thing

Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.

Presently I shall be introduced as 'this venerable old gentleman' and the axe will fall when they raise me to the degree of 'grand old man'. That means on our continent any one with snow-white hair who has kept out of jail till eighty.