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Advertising
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Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
-Stephen Leacock
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Alcohol/Alcoholism
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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.
-Stephen Leacock, Reflections on Riding, 1910
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Deception/Lying
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Men are able to trust one another, knowing the exact degree of dishonesty they are entitled to expect.
-Stephen Leacock
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Dreams
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It may be those who do most, dream most.
-Stephen Leacock
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Enjoyment
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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
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Golf
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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.
-Stephen Leacock, Why I refuse to play Golf
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Humor
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Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.
-Stephen Leacock
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But the deep background that lies behind and beyond what we call humor is revealed only to the few who, by instinct or by effort, have given thought to it. The world's humor, in its best and greatest sense, is perhaps the highest product of our civilization. Its basis lies in the deeper contrasts offered by life itself: the strange incongruity between our aspiration and our achievement, the eager and fretful anxieties of today that fade into nothingness tomorrow, the burning pain and the sharp sorrow that are softened in the gentle retrospect of time, till as we look back upon the course that has been traversed, we pass in view the panorama of our lives, as people in old age may recall, with mingled tears and smiles, the angry quarrels of their childhood. And here, in its larger aspect, humor is blended with pathos till the two are one, and represent, as they have in every age, the mingled heritage of tears and laughter that is our lot on earth.
-Stephen Leacock
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Insurance
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I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.
-Stephen Leacock
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Libraries
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If I were founding a university I would begin with a smoking room; next a dormitory; and then a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had more money that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text books.
-Stephen Leacock
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Life
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Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.
-Stephen Leacock
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Luck
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I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
-Stephen Leacock, Literary Lapses
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Marriage
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Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.
-Stephen Leacock
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Reading
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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
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Sadness
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The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.
-Stephen Leacock
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Books by and about Stephen Leacock