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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.
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
Fool
Yesterdays
Least
Lighted
Education
Dusty
Death
Dates
True
Fools
Need
List
Needs
Lists
Way
Yesterday
More quotes by Stephen Leacock
Chess is one long regret.
Stephen Leacock
Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.
Stephen Leacock
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
You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.
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
A lone maple leaf resting on sand Have you ever been out for a late autumn walk in the closing part of the afternoon, and suddenly looked up to realize that the leaves have practically all gone? And the sun has set and the day gone before you knew it, and with that a cold wind blows across the landscape? That's retirement.
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
My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them.
Stephen Leacock
I've seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.
Stephen Leacock
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.
Stephen Leacock
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
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.
Stephen Leacock
Humour in its highest reach mingles with pathos: it voices sorrow for our human lot and reconciliation with it.
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
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
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
Each section of the British Isles has its own way of laughing, except Wales, which doesn't.
Stephen Leacock
The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
Stephen Leacock
The tears of childhood fall fast and easily, and evil be to him who makes them flow.
Stephen Leacock
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
