Stephen Leacock

“begirt with a flowing kirtle”

— Stephen Leacock

It's a lie, but Heaven will forgive you for it.

— Stephen Leacock

Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.

— Stephen Leacock

It may be those who do most, dream most.

— Stephen Leacock

Professors of theory merely hold post-mortems.

— Stephen Leacock

Chess is one long regret.

— Stephen Leacock

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

— Stephen Leacock

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

— Stephen Leacock

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

— Stephen Leacock

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

— Stephen Leacock

The minute a man is convinced he is interesting, he isn't.

— Stephen Leacock

When actors begin to think, it's time for a change. They are not fitted for it.

— Stephen Leacock

“Many a man inlove with a dimple makes the mistake of marring the whole Girl”

— Stephen Leacock

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

— Stephen Leacock

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

— Stephen Leacock

Now, the essence, the very spirit of Christmas is that we first make believe a thing is so, and lo, it presently…

— Stephen Leacock

All our yesterdays, it is true, have only lighted fools the way to dusty death. But we need at least the dates…

— Stephen Leacock

The great man... walks across his century and leaves the marks of his feet all over it, ripping out the dates on…

— Stephen Leacock

The Victorians needed parody. Without it their literature would have been a rank and weedy growth, over-watered with tears.

— Stephen Leacock

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

— Stephen Leacock

“If their occupation is actual work they prefer to pump water into cisterns, two of which leak through holes in the bottom…

— Stephen Leacock

Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy-it's…

— Stephen Leacock

A lone maple leaf resting on sand Have you ever been out for a late autumn walk in the closing part 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.…

— Stephen Leacock

In earlier times they had no statistics and so they had to fall back on lies. Hence the huge exaggerations of primitive…

— Stephen Leacock

Hockey captures the essence of Canadian experience in the New World. In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold, hockey is the…

— Stephen Leacock

The classical scholars have kept alive the tradition of the superiority of the ancient languages -- a kaleidoscopic mass of suffixes and…

— Stephen Leacock

Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness…

— Stephen Leacock

Most people tire of a lecture in ten minutes; clever people can do it in five. Sensible people never go to lectures…

— Stephen Leacock

Modern critics, who refuse to let a plain thing alone, have now started a theory that Cervantes's work is a vast piece…

— Stephen Leacock

The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific…

— Stephen Leacock

“We always speak of Canada as a new country. In one sense, of course, this is true. The settlement of Europeans on…

— Stephen Leacock

How can you shorten the subject? That stern struggle with the multiplication table, for many people not yet ended in victory, how…

— Stephen Leacock

“Suppose a would-be writer can't begin? I really believe there are many excellent writers who have never written because they never could…

— Stephen Leacock

How strange it is, our little procession of life! The child says, "When I am a big boy." But what is that?…

— Stephen Leacock

We can no longer communicate with the apes by direct language, nor can we understand, without special study, their modes of communication…

— Stephen Leacock

As for politics, well, it all seemed reasonable enough. When the Conservatives got in anywhere, [Judge] Pepperleigh laughed and enjoyed it, simply…

— Stephen Leacock

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

— Stephen Leacock

The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.

— Stephen Leacock

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

— Stephen Leacock