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

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
Might
Things
Reconciling
Comforter
Humour
Contrast
Essentially

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I've seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.
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Being a specialist is one thing, getting a job is another.
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Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.
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You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.
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The tears of childhood fall fast and easily, and evil be to him who makes them flow.
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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.
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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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When actors begin to think, it's time for a change. They are not fitted for it.
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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.
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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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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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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
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You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.
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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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We think of the noble object for which the professor appears tonight, we may be assured that the Lord will forgive any one who will laugh at the professor.
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There is an old motto that runs, If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. This is nonsense. It ought to read, If at first you don't succeed, quit, quit at once.
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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.
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Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.
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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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Golf may be played on Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.
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