Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.
~ Ambrose Bierce
Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worth while.
Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue.
Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.
Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.
Bride: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.
Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.
Women in love are less ashamed than men. They have less to be ashamed of.
The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
Beauty, n: the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.
The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify we give the name of knowledge.
Ardor, n. The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.
Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.
Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is - it is her shadow.
Friendless. Having no favors to bestow. Destitute of fortune. Addicted to utterance of truth and common sense.
To be positive is to be mistaken at the top of one's voice.
Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.
What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.
Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
Jealous, adj. Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.
Doubt is the father of invention.
Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.
Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.
Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
Alliance - in international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.
Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.
