Quotes from leacock stephen ii

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

A sportsman is a man who, every now and then, simply has to get out and kill something. Not that he is cruel. He wouldn't hurt a fly. It's not big enough.

Humour is the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life.

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

Professors of theory merely hold post-mortems.

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

The rushing of his spirit from its prison-house was as rapid as a hunted cat passing over a garden fence.

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.

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

A college lecture is a queer thing, for people not accustomed to it. The Professor isn't exactly dictating the lecture, and he isn't exactly talking, and the class are not exactly taking dictation and they're not exactly listening. It's a system they both have grown so used to that it's second nature.

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?

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

The classical scholars have kept alive the tradition of the superiority of the ancient languages -- a kaleidoscopic mass of suffixes and prefixes, supposed to represent an infinite shading of meaning. It is a character they share with the Ojibway and the Zulu.

The Lord said "Let there be wheat" and Saskatchewan was born.