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The landlady of a boarding-house is a parallelogram - that is, an oblong angular figure, which cannot be described, but which is equal to anything

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
House
Boarding
Cannot
Swagger
Anything
Described
Figure
Oblong
Figures
Landlady
Equal
Parallelogram
Economy
Angular
Science
Swag

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You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.
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Each section of the British Isles has its own way of laughing, except Wales, which doesn't.
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The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.
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You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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All our yesterdays, it is true, have only lighted fools the way to dusty death. But we need at least the dates of the yesterdays and the list of the fools.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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I've seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.
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Humour is essentially a comforter, reconciling us to things as they are in contrast to things as they might be.
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Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.
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