Home > Work > STEPHEN LEACOCK PREMIUM 12 BOOK HUMOUR COLLECTION + Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. (Timeless Wisdom Collection 2588)
1 " 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 , STEPHEN LEACOCK PREMIUM 12 BOOK HUMOUR COLLECTION + Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. (Timeless Wisdom Collection 2588)
2 " In the field of letters, as apart from medicine and science, professors do not lead but follow. Their wisdom is always that of a post-mortem. They "
3 " My judgment is that the rich undergo cruel trials and bitter tragedies of which the poor know nothing. In the first place I find that the rich suffer perpetually from money troubles. The poor sit snugly at home while sterling exchange falls ten points in a day. Do they care? Not a bit. An adverse balance of trade washes over the nation like a flood. Who have to mop it up? The rich. Call money rushes up to a hundred per cent, and the poor can still sit and laugh at a ten cent moving picture show and forget it. But the rich are troubled by money all the time. "
4 " I do not think that there is any doubt that educated people possess a far wider range of humour than the uneducated class. Some people, of course, get overeducated and become hopelessly academic. The word "highbrow" has been invented exactly to fit the case. The sense of humour in the highbrow has become atrophied, or, to vary the metaphor, it is submerged or buried under the accumulated strata of his education, on the top soil of which flourishes a fine growth of conceit. "
5 " Surely if we all try hard, we can all lift ourselves up high above the average. It looks a little difficult mathematically, but that's nothing. "
6 " To me, as a lover of Nature, the waving of a tree conveys thoughts which are never conveyed to me except by seeing a tree wave. "
7 " have just been reading in the press the agonizing statement that there are only 4,000,000,000,000 cords of pulp wood left in the world, and that in another fifty years it will be all gone. "
8 " Few people would realise that it is much harder to write one of Owen Seaman's "funny" poems in Punch than to write one of the Archbishop of Canterbury's sermons. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is a greater work than Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Charles Dickens's 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. "
9 " The Prophet in Our Midst "
10 " When a man sits buried in a book, it is not the man that you see and know that is reading: deep down in him are antecedent generations--soldiers, pirates, martyrs, fading back to cave men. As he reads, the 'universal' book is calling to one of them. "
11 " education that stops with school stops where it is beginning. "