Quotes from Stephen Leacock

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.

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

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.

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

Advertising - A judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

concealed from view a face so face-like in its appearance as to be positively facial.

Many a man inlove with a dimple makes the mistake of marring the whole Girl

It just shows the difference between people. There was Myra who treated lovers like dogs and would slap them across the face with a banana skin to show her utter independence. And there was Miss Cleghorn, who was sallow, and who bought a forty cent Ancient History to improve herself: and yet if she'd hit any man in Mariposa with a banana skin, he'd have had her arrested for assault.

Dickens had, with all his genius, the narrow short sight of his day and class, sentimental tears for poverty but no vision to remove it except by inviting everybody to be as noble a fellow as himself. War

Pepperleigh always read the foreign news -- the news of things that he couldn't alter -- as a form of wild and stimulating torment.

Pupkin shifted his opinions like the glass in a kaleidoscope.

The only time when you and I really entered into literature, entered the kingdom of letters, was when each of us sat as a child absorbed in the magic pages of a book: in some snug corner of a quiet room or sheltered in some lost recess of the seashore with the muffled sound of the wind and sea to concentrate our thought — that is reading, that is literature.

If their occupation is actual work they prefer to pump water into cisterns, two of which leak through holes in the bottom and one of which is water-tight. A, of course, has the good one;

begirt with a flowing kirtle

In the field of letters, as apart from medicine and science, professors do not lead but follow. Their wisdom is always that of a post-mortem. They

broke into a blaze of effulgence.

I do not think that there is any doubt that educated people possess a far wider range of humour than the uneducated class. Some people, of course, get overeducated and become hopelessly academic. The word highbrow has been invented exactly to fit the case. The sense of humour in the highbrow has become atrophied, or, to vary the metaphor, it is submerged or buried under the accumulated strata of his education, on the top soil of which flourishes a fine growth of conceit.

Mr. Gingham had the true spirit of his profession, and such words as funeral or coffin or hearse never passed his lips. He spoke always of interments, of caskets, and coaches, using terms that were calculated rather to bring out the majesty and sublimity of death than to parade its horrors.