Top 70 Stephen Leacock Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better.”

— Stephen Leacock

2. “Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy-it’s the occurring that’s hard.”

— Stephen Leacock

3. “Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.”

— Stephen Leacock

4. “Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.”

— Stephen Leacock

5. “Chess is one long regret.”

— Stephen Leacock

6. “It may be those who do most, dream most.”

— Stephen Leacock

7. “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.””

— Stephen Leacock

8. “It was Einstein who made the real trouble. He announced in 1905 that there was no such thing as absolute rest. After that there never was.”

— Stephen Leacock

9. “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.”

— Stephen Leacock

10. “In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.”

— Stephen Leacock

11. “Being a specialist is one thing, getting a job is another.”

— Stephen Leacock

12. “I am what is called a professor emeritus – from the Latin e, ‘out,’ and meritus, ’so he ought to be.”

— Stephen Leacock

13. “I’ve seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.”

— Stephen Leacock

14. “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

15. “The Lord said ‘let there be wheat’ and Saskatchewan was born.”

— Stephen Leacock

16. “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

17. “I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.”

— Stephen Leacock

18. “With the Great Detective, to think was to act, and to act was to think. Frequently he could do both together.”

— Stephen Leacock

19. “Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets.”

— Stephen Leacock

20. “Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.”

— Stephen Leacock

21. “He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.”

— Stephen Leacock

22. “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

23. “Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.”

— Stephen Leacock

24. “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

25. “I owe a lot to my teachers and mean to pay them back some day.”

— Stephen Leacock

26. “About the only good thing you can say about old age is, it’s better than being dead!”

— Stephen Leacock

27. “Too much has been said of the heroes of history-the strong men, the troublesome men; too little of the amiable, the kindly, the tolerant.”

— Stephen Leacock

28. “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

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

— Stephen Leacock

30. “It’s called political economy because it is has nothing to do with either politics or economy.”

— Stephen Leacock

31. “Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances on the concertina, will admit that even suicide has its brighter aspects.”

— Stephen Leacock

32. “You know, many a man realizes late in life that if when he was a boy he had known what he knows now, instead of being what he is he might be what he won’t; but how few boys stop to think that if they knew what they don’t know instead of being what they will be, they wouldn’t be?”

— Stephen Leacock

33. “Now, the essence, the very spirit of Christmas is that we first make believe a thing is so, and lo, it presently turns out to be so.”

— Stephen Leacock

34. “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

35. “A silk dress in four sections, and shoes with high heels that would have broken the heart of John Calvin.”

— Stephen Leacock

36. “Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it.”

— Stephen Leacock

37. “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

38. “The English are terribly lazy about fighting. They like to get it over and done with and then set up a game of cricket.”

— Stephen Leacock

39. “It’s a lie, but Heaven will forgive you for it.”

— Stephen Leacock

40. “Each section of the British Isles has its own way of laughing, except Wales, which doesn’t.”

— Stephen Leacock

41. “The classical scholars have kept alive the tradition of the superiority of the ancient languages – a kaleidoscopic mass of suffixes and prefixes, supposed to represent an infinite shading of meaning. It is a character they share with the Ojibway and the Zulu.”

— Stephen Leacock

42. “There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike – information and wit.”

— Stephen Leacock

43. “Dickens had, with all his genius, the narrow short sight of his day and class, sentimental tears for poverty but no vision to remove it except by inviting everybody to be as noble a fellow as himself. War.”

— Stephen Leacock

44. “Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.”

— Stephen Leacock

45. “The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.”

— Stephen Leacock

46. “The tears of childhood fall fast and easily, and evil be to him who makes them flow.”

— Stephen Leacock

47. “Men are able to trust one another, knowing the exact degree of dishonesty they are entitled to expect.”

— Stephen Leacock

48. “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

49. “Most people can tire of a lecture in fifteen minutes, clever people can do it in five, and sensible people don’t go to lectures at all.”

— Stephen Leacock

50. “Any two meals at a boarding-house are together less than two square meals.”

— Stephen Leacock