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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

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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
Believe
Presently
Make
Christmas
Essence
Turns
Spirit
Firsts
First
Thing
Transcendentalism

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The Victorians needed parody. Without it their literature would have been a rank and weedy growth, over-watered with tears.
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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.
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Humour in its highest reach mingles with pathos: it voices sorrow for our human lot and reconciliation with it.
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Indeed I have always found that the only thing in regard to Toronto which faraway people know for certain is that McGill University is in it.
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The minute a man is convinced he is interesting, he isn't.
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About the only good thing you can say about old age is, it's better than being dead!
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The tears of childhood fall fast and easily, and evil be to him who makes them flow.
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When actors begin to think, it's time for a change. They are not fitted for it.
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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.
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You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.
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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.
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Presently I shall be introduced as 'this venerable old gentleman' and the axe will fall when they raise me to the degree of 'grand old man'. That means on our continent any one with snow-white hair who has kept out of jail till eighty.
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My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them.
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I've seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.
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Modern critics, who refuse to let a plain thing alone, have now started a theory that Cervantes's work is a vast piece of symbolism. If so, Cervantes didn't know it himself and nobody thought of it for three hundred years. He meant it as a satire upon the silly romances of chivalry.
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Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.
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I am what is called a professor emeritus—from the Latin e, 'out,' and meritus, 'so he ought to be.
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Men are able to trust one another, knowing the exact degree of dishonesty they are entitled to expect.
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Chess is one long regret.
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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.
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