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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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Stephen Leacock
Age: 74 †
Born: 1869
Born: December 30
Died: 1944
Died: March 28
Economist
Humorist
Political Scientist
Writer
Hants
Stephen Butler Leacock
Life
Thereof
Kindly
Contemplation
Artistic
Defined
Expression
Humor
Incongruities
May
Incongruity

More quotes by Stephen Leacock

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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.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
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.
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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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Hockey captures the essence of Canadian experience in the New World. In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold, hockey is the chance of life, and an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.
Stephen Leacock
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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
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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.
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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I've seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.
Stephen Leacock
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The minute a man is convinced he is interesting, he isn't.
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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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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I admit that when the facts are not good enough, I always exaggerate them.
Stephen Leacock
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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.
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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Humour in its highest reach mingles with pathos: it voices sorrow for our human lot and reconciliation with it.
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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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.
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