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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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Stephen Leacock
Age: 74 †
Born: 1869
Born: December 30
Died: 1944
Died: March 28
Economist
Humorist
Political Scientist
Writer
Hants
Stephen Butler Leacock
Life
Humour
World
Collapse
Overcrowded
Central
Sordid
Saved
Dickens
Tragedy
Premature
Save
Neurotic
Couldn
Greatly
Least
Served

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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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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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About the only good thing you can say about old age is, it's better than being dead!
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Humour in its highest reach mingles with pathos: it voices sorrow for our human lot and reconciliation with it.
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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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Each section of the British Isles has its own way of laughing, except Wales, which doesn't.
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Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.
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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.
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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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Humour is essentially a comforter, reconciling us to things as they are in contrast to things as they might be.
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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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It may be those who do most, dream most.
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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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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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