Canadian humorist (1869-1944)
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
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
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
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
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
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
He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
My Discovery of England
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
How to Write
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
The Perfect Salesman
You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Last Leaves
The tears of childhood fall fast and easily, and evil be to him who makes them flow.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Short Circuits
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
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