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

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
Europe
America
Always
Disasters
Sorrows
Disaster
Fortune
Brought
Sorrow

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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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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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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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With the Great Detective, to think was to act, and to act was to think. Frequently he could do both together.
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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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Chess is one long regret.
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Most people tire of a lecture in ten minutes clever people can do it in five. Sensible people never go to lectures at all. But the people who do go to a lecture and who get tired of it, presently hold it as a sort of grudge against the lecturer personally. In reality his sufferings are worse than theirs.
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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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American politicians do anything for money... English politicians take the money and won't do anything.
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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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The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
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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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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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I am what is called a professor emeritus—from the Latin e, 'out,' and meritus, 'so he ought to be.
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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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Too much has been said of the heroes of history-the strong men, the troublesome men too little of the amiable, the kindly, the tolerant.
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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.
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The parent who could see his boy as he really is, would shake his head and say: 'Willie is no good I'll sell him.
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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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You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.
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