Stephen Leacock Quotes

I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.

In a country which two hundred years ago was peopled only by savages and whose government has ... been no other than republican, it is really wonderful that there should be any polite authors at all in any line ...

The most striking quality common to all primitive art is its intense vitality. It is something made by a people with a direct and immediate response to life.

The singer-songwriter has always played music that was stylistically rooted in the '30s and the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. But the fact of the matter is that none of us remember the Depression firsthand.

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they passed.

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.

Very long ago our ancestors had moral systems. Our current institutions are only a couple of thousand years old, which is really not old in the eyes of a biologist.

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

All culture must have arisen from cult.

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.

We probably, as primitive people, made music before we actually had a language, and that's where language comes from.

It is the mass dream of inverted self, populous with fears overt and secret, that forms the continuous but gossamer thread upon which are strung as phantom beads all civilizations from the remotest past of record to that of the present day and hour.

Well, right now, I'm very fascinated with 1920s Berlin. I mean, probably the more interesting thing would be to go to the beginning of civilization or precivilization - like polytheistic times. It would be interesting to see what came before modern religion and culture - what circumstances created the environment or the need for it.

Everything has been said, and we are more than seven thousand years of human thought too late.

History is the key to everything: politics, religion, even fashion.

Dig into the roots of culture, and it will grow. It's like a grass that is growing, and it cannot stop, and music is like the fertilizer for that.

For me, a story begins with music: I feel the rhythm, the cadence, the pulse of the characters and their voices and the setting. Because I had just finished writing a book called 'Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine,' I was already filled with the music of the lives and culture of the Irish people, so I thought, why not use it?

Music is part of history, and our history has lessons that cannot be separated from our greatest music.

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed.

I have a long view of history - my orientation is archaeological because I'm always thinking in terms of ancient Greece and Rome, ancient Persia and Egypt.

If you look back at the great classics and the epics and myths, they were for everyone. Different people got different things from them, but everyone was invited to participate.

A little part of my life is built around ancient art.

I am fascinated with times past.