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

Stephen Leacock

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Stephen Leacock
Age: 74 †
Born: 1869
Born: December 30
Died: 1944
Died: March 28
Economist
Humorist
Political Scientist
Writer
Hants
Stephen Butler Leacock
Book
Machinery
Primitive
Belong
Medicine
Class
Literature
Reading
Music
Classics

More quotes by Stephen Leacock

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In earlier times they had no statistics and so they had to fall back on lies. Hence the huge exaggerations of primitive literature, giants, miracles, wonders! It's the size that counts. They did it with lies and we do it with statistics: but it's all the same.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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There is no doubt that many things in life come to us...at backrounds so to speak. Happiness is one of them.
Stephen Leacock
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You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.
Stephen Leacock
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I am what is called a professor emeritus—from the Latin e, 'out,' and meritus, 'so he ought to be.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.
Stephen Leacock
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Humour is essentially a comforter, reconciling us to things as they are in contrast to things as they might be.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.
Stephen Leacock
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When actors begin to think, it's time for a change. They are not fitted for it.
Stephen Leacock
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Chess is one long regret.
Stephen Leacock
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It may be those who do most, dream most.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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The tears of childhood fall fast and easily, and evil be to him who makes them flow.
Stephen Leacock
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Golf may be played on Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.
Stephen Leacock
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Men are able to trust one another, knowing the exact degree of dishonesty they are entitled to expect.
Stephen Leacock
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You frequently ask, where are the friends of your childhood, and urge that they shall be brought back to you. As far as I am able to learn, those of your friends who are not in jail are still right there in your native village. You point out that they were wont to share your gambols, If so, you are certainly entitled to have theirs now.
Stephen Leacock