Stephen Leacock Quotes

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

- Stephen Leacock

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

- Stephen Leacock

There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike - information and wit.

- Stephen Leacock

A sportsman is a man who every now and then, simply has to get out and kill something.

- Stephen Leacock

The Lord said 'let there be wheat' and Saskatchewan was born.

- Stephen Leacock

It's called political economy because it is has nothing to do with either politics or economy.

- Stephen Leacock

What we call creative work, ought not to be called work at all, because it isn't. I imagine that Thomas Edison never did a day's work in his last fifty years.

- Stephen Leacock

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

- Stephen Leacock

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

- Stephen Leacock

It takes a good deal of physical courage to ride a horse. This, however, I have. I get it at about forty cents a flask, and take it as required.

- Stephen Leacock

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

- Stephen Leacock

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

- Stephen Leacock

The landlady of a boarding-house is a parallelogram - that is, an oblong angular figure, which cannot be described, but which is equal to anything.

- Stephen Leacock

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

- Stephen Leacock

We think of the noble object for which the professor appears tonight, we may be assured that the Lord will forgive any one who will laugh at the professor.

- Stephen Leacock

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.

- Stephen Leacock

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

- Stephen Leacock

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

- Stephen Leacock

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

- 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

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

- Stephen Leacock

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

- Stephen Leacock

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

- Stephen Leacock

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

- Stephen Leacock

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

- Stephen Leacock

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

- Stephen Leacock

Now, the essence, the very spirit of Christmas is that we first make believe a thing is so, and lo, it presently turns out to be so.

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

- Stephen Leacock

It may be those who do most, dream most.

- Stephen Leacock