Quote

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.

Stephen Leacock

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Stephen Leacock
Age: 74 †
Born: 1869
Born: December 30
Died: 1944
Died: March 28
Economist
Humorist
Political Scientist
Writer
Hants
Stephen Butler Leacock
Simplicity
Trouble
Difficult
Ideas
Writing
Jotting
Occurring
Occur

More quotes by Stephen Leacock

Image
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
Image
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
Image
A lone maple leaf resting on sand 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? And the sun has set and the day gone before you knew it, and with that a cold wind blows across the landscape? That's retirement.
Stephen Leacock
Image
The road comes to an end just when it ought to be getting somewhere. The passengers alight, shaken and weary, to begin, all over again, something else.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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
Image
The great man... walks across his century and leaves the marks of his feet all over it, ripping out the dates on his goloshes as he passes.
Stephen Leacock
Image
You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.
Stephen Leacock
Image
I am what is called a professor emeritus—from the Latin e, 'out,' and meritus, 'so he ought to be.
Stephen Leacock
Image
With the Great Detective, to think was to act, and to act was to think. Frequently he could do both together.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.
Stephen Leacock
Image
Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
Stephen Leacock
Image
In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.
Stephen Leacock
Image
There is an old motto that runs, If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. This is nonsense. It ought to read, If at first you don't succeed, quit, quit at once.
Stephen Leacock
Image
When actors begin to think, it's time for a change. They are not fitted for it.
Stephen Leacock
Image
American politicians do anything for money... English politicians take the money and won't do anything.
Stephen Leacock
Image
Chess is one long regret.
Stephen Leacock
Image
You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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.
Stephen Leacock