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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
Reconciling
Comforter
Humour
Contrast
Essentially
Might
Things

More quotes by Stephen Leacock

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Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.
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American politicians do anything for money... English politicians take the money and won't do anything.
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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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I am what is called a professor emeritus—from the Latin e, 'out,' and meritus, 'so he ought to be.
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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.
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It may be those who do most, dream most.
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You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.
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In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.
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You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.
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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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Newspapermen learn to call a murderer an alleged murderer and the King of England the alleged King of England in order to avoid libel suits.
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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 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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Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.
Stephen Leacock
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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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Each section of the British Isles has its own way of laughing, except Wales, which doesn't.
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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
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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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Chess is one long regret.
Stephen Leacock
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The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
Stephen Leacock