STEPHEN LEACOCK QUOTES

Canadian humorist (1869-1944)

With the Great Detective, to think was to act, and to act was to think. Frequently he could do both together.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Maddened by Mystery: or, The Defective Detective

Tags: thinking


With the thermometer at 30 below zero and the wind behind him, a man walking on Main Street in Winnipeg knows which side of him is which.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

My Discovery of the West

Tags: Canada


I have always found that the only kind of statement worth making is an overstatement. A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries further.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

The Garden of Folly

Tags: truth


We can no longer communicate with the apes by direct language, nor can we understand, without special study, their modes of communication which we have long since replaced by more elaborate forms. But it is at least presumable that they could still detect in our speech, at least when it is public and elaborate, the underlying tone values with which it began. Thus if we could take a gibbon ape to a college public lecture, he would not understand it, but he would "get a good deal of it." This is all the students get anyway.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

How to Write


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

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Model Memoirs and Other Sketches from Simple to Serious

Tags: lying


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

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Leacock on Life

Tags: golf


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.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

My Remarkable Uncle

Tags: Charles Dickens


He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

My Discovery of England


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.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Charles Dickens: His Life and Work

Tags: funny quotes


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.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Feast of Stephen


Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

preface, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town


You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Last Leaves

Tags: poverty


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

STEPHEN LEACOCK

The Social Criticism of Stephen Leacock

Tags: men


You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

How to Write


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

STEPHEN LEACOCK

"Insurance Up to Date", Literary Lapses

Tags: death


Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

The Perfect Salesman

Tags: advertising


The tears of childhood fall fast and easily, and evil be to him who makes them flow.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Short Circuits

Tags: tears


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

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Leacock on Life

Tags: luck


The road comes to an end just when it ought to be getting somewhere. The passengers alight, shaken and weary, to begin, all over again, something else.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Feast of Stephen


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? You hadn't realized it. And you notice that the sun has set already, the day gone before you knew it -- and with that a cold wind blows across the landscape. That's retirement.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Reader's Digest, Volume 56, 1950

Tags: retirement