Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

It may be those who do most, dream most.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Being a specialist is one thing, getting a job is another.

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

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

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

Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.

Most people can tire of a lecture in fifteen minutes, clever people can do it in five, and sensible people don't go to lectures at all.

In earlier times they had no statistics and so they had to fall back on lies. Hence the huge exaggerations of primitive literature, giants, miracles, wonders! It's the size that counts. They did it with lies and we do it with statistics: but it's all the same.

The student of arithmetic who has mastered the first four rules of his art, and successfully striven with money sums and fractions, finds himself confronted by an unbroken expanse of questions known as problems.

You know, many a man realizes late in life that if when he was a boy he had known what he knows now, instead of being what he is he might be what he won't; but how few boys stop to think that if they knew what they don't know instead of being what they will be, they wouldn't be?

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

American politicians do anything for money... English politicians take the money and won't do anything.

About the only good thing you can say about old age is, it's better than being dead!

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.

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

Humour is essentially a comforter, reconciling us to things as they are in contrast to things as they might be.

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

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.

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

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."

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

If I were founding a university I would begin with a smoking room; next a dormitory; and then a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had more money that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text books.

Hockey captures the essence of Canadian experience in the New World. In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold, hockey is the chance of life, and an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.

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

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.

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

Newspapermen learn to call a murderer "an alleged murderer" and the King of England "the alleged King of England" in order to avoid libel suits.

Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.

I owe a lot to my teachers and mean to pay them back some day.

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.