Stephen Leacock

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

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

Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.

The best definition of humour I know is: humour may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life and the artistic expression thereof. I think this is the best I know because I wrote it myself.

Any man will admit if need be that his sight is not good or that he cannot swim or shoots badly with a rifle but to touch upon his sense of humour is to give him mortal affront.

You encourage a comic man too much and he gets silly.

I never realized that there was history close at hand beside my very own home. I did not realize that the old grave that stood among the brambles at the foot of our farm was history.

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

Lord Ronald said nothing he flung himself from the room flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.

I'm a great believer in luck. I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

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

In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages ... so we just go right ahead and use English for literature Scotch for sermons and American for conversation.

The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

When actors begin to think it is time for a change. They are not fitted for it.

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