Success Quote by Stephen Leacock

The line lands like a small rebuke to the modern cult of busyness. Leacock flips the usual insult tucked inside “dreamer” and “doer” and suggests they’re not rivals but accomplices. The phrasing “It may be” is doing quiet work: it’s not a sermon, it’s a wry hypothesis, the kind a humorist-economist can offer without sounding preachy. That hedged opening invites the reader to supply their own evidence, which makes the claim feel discovered rather than delivered.

Subtextually, it’s a defense of imagination as a driver of action, not an escape from it. The people “who do most” aren’t necessarily hyper-efficient machines; they’re often the ones with an internal surplus, a private theater of possibilities that keeps replenishing their stamina. Leacock’s twist also exposes a classed assumption: society tends to grant “dreaming” to artists and idlers while reserving “doing” for practical types. He collapses that hierarchy. Dreams, in this reading, aren’t airy fantasies but speculative models - the mental prototypes that make real work possible. That’s an economist’s sensibility smuggled into a poet’s cadence.

Context matters: Leacock wrote in an era of accelerating industry and managerial rationality, when productivity was becoming a moral language. His humor often punctured that self-importance. Here, he suggests that the most effective actors may be the least “realistic” in the narrow sense, because realism without imagination is just maintenance. The quote works because it rehabilitates the dreamer without romanticizing inertia, and it flatters the doer without sanctifying grind.