Quote

Humour is essentially a comforter, reconciling us to things as they are in contrast to things as they might be.

Stephen Leacock

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Stephen Leacock
Age: 74 †
Born: 1869
Born: December 30
Died: 1944
Died: March 28
Economist
Humorist
Political Scientist
Writer
Hants
Stephen Butler Leacock
Contrast
Essentially
Might
Things
Reconciling
Comforter
Humour

More quotes by Stephen Leacock

Image
When actors begin to think, it's time for a change. They are not fitted for it.
Stephen Leacock
Image
You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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
Image
Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Chess is one long regret.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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.
Stephen Leacock
Image
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
Image
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
Image
About the only good thing you can say about old age is, it's better than being dead!
Stephen Leacock
Image
Men are able to trust one another, knowing the exact degree of dishonesty they are entitled to expect.
Stephen Leacock
Image
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.
Stephen Leacock
Image
Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
Stephen Leacock
Image
You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.
Stephen Leacock
Image
With the Great Detective, to think was to act, and to act was to think. Frequently he could do both together.
Stephen Leacock
Image
Humour in its highest reach mingles with pathos: it voices sorrow for our human lot and reconciliation with it.
Stephen Leacock