Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Leacock

Luck gets demoted from mystical force to measurable output in Leacock's line, and that demotion is the joke - sharpened by the fact that he makes it sound like a folksy confession. "I am a great believer in luck" sets you up for superstition, maybe even surrender. Then the second clause snaps shut like a trap: luck appears not as a lottery ticket but as a dividend. The harder he works, the more "luck" he accumulates. It's a neat bit of rhetorical arbitrage, buying sentiment cheap and selling it back as discipline.

The intent is corrective without being scolding. Leacock doesn't deny randomness; he reframes it. Work increases the surface area for chance to land on you: more attempts, more contacts, more competence, more visibility. Calling that outcome "luck" lets him acknowledge the role of contingency while still insisting on personal agency. It's motivational, but also faintly cynical - a wink at how people use luck as a comforting explanation for other people's success and a protective excuse for their own stagnation.

The subtext is social: we love narratives where fortune smiles selectively, because they preserve the fantasy that the world is unfair in a way that absolves us. Leacock flips that comfort into a challenge. Coming from an economist - and a humorist by temperament - the line doubles as a mini-model of incentives. "Luck" becomes the name we give to compounding: effort today creates conditions that look like serendipity tomorrow. It's not anti-romantic; it's anti-alibi.