Stephen Leacock Quotes

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.

There is an old motto that runs, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." This is nonsense. It ought to read, "If at first you don't succeed, quit, quit at once."

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

To write well it is first necessary to have something to say.

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

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

There is no doubt that many things in life come to us...at backrounds so to speak. Happiness is one of them.

The English are terribly lazy about fighting. They like to get it over and done with and then set up a game of cricket.

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

Professors of theory merely hold post-mortems.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them.

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

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

Too much has been said of the heroes of history-the strong men, the troublesome men; too little of the amiable, the kindly, the tolerant.

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

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