Quotes from Stephen Leacock

Any two meals at a boarding-house are together less than two square meals.

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

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

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.

Most people tire of a lecture in ten minutes; clever people can do it in five. Sensible people never go to lectures at all. But the people who do go to a lecture and who get tired of it, presently hold it as a sort of grudge against the lecturer personally. In reality his sufferings are worse than theirs.

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.

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.

He flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

but these Cubans, you know, have got a sort of Spanish warmth of heart that you don't see in business men in America, and that touches you.

Surely if we all try hard, we can all lift ourselves up high above the average. It looks a little difficult mathematically, but that's nothing.

I have often heard people who might sit with him on the lawn, ask him to translate some of it. But he always refused. One couldn't translate it, he said. It lost so much in the translation that it was better not to try. It was far wiser not to attempt it. If you undertook to translate it, there was something gone, something missing immediately.

Sometimes Pupkin would swear off and keep away from the cursed thing for weeks, and then perhaps he'd see by sheer accident a pile of matches on the table, or a match lying on the floor and it would start the craze in him.