Quotes from leacock stephen

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

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

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.

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.