Quotes from Stephen Leacock

a single faux pas might prove to be a false step.

Bagshaw owned a half share in the harness business and a quarter share in the tannery and that made him a business man. He paid for a pew in the Presbyterian Church and that represented religion in Parliament. He attended college for two sessions thirty years ago, and that represented education and kept him abreast with modern science, if not ahead of it. He kept a little account in one bank and a big account in the other, so that he was a rich man or a poor man at the same time.

Already Edward Drone was beginning to feel something of what it meant to hold office and there was creeping into his manner the quiet self-importance which is the first sign of conscious power.

To me, as a lover of Nature, the waving of a tree conveys thoughts which are never conveyed to me except by seeing a tree wave.

have just been reading in the press the agonizing statement that there are only 4,000,000,000,000 cords of pulp wood left in the world, and that in another fifty years it will be all gone.

See how the passengers all turn and talk to one another now as they get nearer and nearer to the little town.

As for politics, well, it all seemed reasonable enough. When the Conservatives got in anywhere, [Judge] Pepperleigh laughed and enjoyed it, simply because it does one good to see a straight, fine, honest fight where the best man wins. When a Liberal got in, it made him mad, and he said so,--not, mind you; from any political bias, for his office forbid it,--but simply because one can't bear to see the country go absolutely to the devil.

Socialism, like every other impassioned human effort, will flourish best under martyrdom. It will languish and perish in the dry sunlight of open discussion.

Boarding-House Geometry DEFINITIONS AND AXIOMS All boarding-houses are the same boarding-house. Boarders in the same boarding-house and on the same flat are equal to one another. A single room is that which has no parts and no magnitude. The landlady of a boarding-house is a

The Prophet in Our Midst

When a man sits buried in a book, it is not the man that you see and know that is reading: deep down in him are antecedent generations--soldiers, pirates, martyrs, fading back to cave men. As he reads, the 'universal' book is calling to one of them.

education that stops with school stops where it is beginning.

When actors begin to think, it is time for a change. They are not fitted for it.

The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.

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

In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages ... so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversation.

The British are terribly lazy about fighting. They like to get it over and done with and then set up a game of cricket.

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

I never realized that there was history, close at hand, beside my very own home. I did not realize that the old grave that stood among the brambles at the foot of our farm was history.

The best definition of humour I know is: humour may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof. I think this is the best I know because I wrote it myself.

You encourage a comic man too much, and he gets silly.

Any man will admit if need be that his sight is not good, or that he cannot swim or shoots badly with a rifle, but to touch upon his sense of humour is to give him mortal affront.

Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.

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