STEPHEN LEACOCK

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.

Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets.

It's a lie, but Heaven will forgive you for it.

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.

It's called political economy because it is has nothing to do with either politics or economy.

It may be those who do most, dream most.

Each section of the British Isles has its own way of laughing, except Wales, which doesn't.

A sportsman is a man who every now and then, simply has to get out and kill something.

It is to be observed that 'angling' is the name given to fishing by people who can't fish.

Golf may be played on Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.

There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike - information and wit.

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

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

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.

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

I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

On the same bill and on the same side of it there should not be two charges for the same thing.

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.

The Lord said 'let there be wheat' and Saskatchewan was born.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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