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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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Stephen Leacock
Age: 74 †
Born: 1869
Born: December 30
Died: 1944
Died: March 28
Economist
Humorist
Political Scientist
Writer
Hants
Stephen Butler Leacock
Twain
Aristotle
Mark
Funny
Difficult
Must
Great
Moliere
Time
Emerson
More quotes by Stephen Leacock
With the Great Detective, to think was to act, and to act was to think. Frequently he could do both together.
Stephen Leacock
The tears of childhood fall fast and easily, and evil be to him who makes them flow.
Stephen Leacock
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.
Stephen Leacock
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
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.
Stephen Leacock
I've seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.
Stephen Leacock
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.
Stephen Leacock
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
I am what is called a professor emeritus—from the Latin e, 'out,' and meritus, 'so he ought to be.
Stephen Leacock
Men are able to trust one another, knowing the exact degree of dishonesty they are entitled to expect.
Stephen Leacock
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
In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.
Stephen Leacock
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
There is no doubt that many things in life come to us...at backrounds so to speak. Happiness is one of them.
Stephen Leacock
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
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.
Stephen Leacock
I admit that when the facts are not good enough, I always exaggerate them.
Stephen Leacock
About the only good thing you can say about old age is, it's better than being dead!
Stephen Leacock
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
The minute a man is convinced he is interesting, he isn't.
Stephen Leacock