Woman absent is woman dead.
Abstainer. A weak man who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
Absurdity. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Acquaintance: a degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous.
Acquaintance. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
An acquaintance is someone we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Consult. To seek another's approval of a course already decided on.
Age. That period of life in which we compound for the vices that remain by reviling those we have no longer the vigor to commit.
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.
Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.
Genealogy. An account of one's descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own.
Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.
Admiral. That part of a warship which does the talking while the figurehead does the thinking.
Irreligion. The principal one of the great faiths of the world.
Beauty. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
Bigot, one who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.
Bore -- a person who talks when you wish him to listen.
Corporation. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
Don't steal; thou it never thus compete successfully in business. Cheat.
Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
To be positive: to be mistaken at the top of one's voice.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.
When in Rome, do as Rome does.
Compromise. Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to have, and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due.
The Senate is a body of old men charged with high duties and misdemeanors.
Conservative. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
A coward is one who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.
Creditor. One of a tribe of savages dwelling beyond the Financial Straits and dreaded for their desolating incursions.
Abscond. To move in a mysterious way, commonly with the property of another.
The covers of this book are too far apart.
A cynic is a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, and not as they ought to be.
Forgetfulness. A gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.
Deliberation. The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.
Destiny. A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.
Consul. In American politics, a person who having failed to secure an office from the people is given one by the Administration on condition that he leave the country.
Divorce. A resumption of diplomatic relations and rectification of boundaries.
Dog. A kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship.
Opiate. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard.
Duty. That which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
Education is that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
Egotist. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than me.
An egotist is a person interested in himself than in me!
Enthusiasm. A distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.
Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.
Experience. The wisdom that enables us to recognize in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
Faith. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Fidelity. A virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.
Edible. Good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
To apologize is to lay the foundation for a future offense.
A funeral is a pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker.
Future: That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
The gambling known as business looks with severe disfavor on the business known as gambling.
Confidante. One entrusted by A with the secrets of B confided to herself by C.
Habit is a shackle for the free.
Happiness is an agreeable sensation, arising from contemplating the misery of others.
An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
Historian. A broad -- gauge gossip.
Alien. An American sovereign in his probationary state.
Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.
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.
Impiety. Your irreverence toward my deity.
Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke.
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify.
Laughter -- An interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious and, though intermittent, incurable.
Litigant. A person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bones.
Laziness. Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.
Learning. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
Life. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.
A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
A man is known by the company he organizes.
Incompatibility. In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination.
The world has suffered more from the ravages of ill-advised marriages than from virginity.
Marriage. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
Before undergoing a surgical operation, arrange your temporal affairs. You may live.
An accident is an inevitable occurrence due to the actions of immutable natural laws.
Miss: A title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the market. Miss, Misses (Mrs.) and Mister (Mr.) are the three most distinctly disagreeable words in the language, in sound and sense. Two are corruptions of Mistress, the other of Master. If we must have them, let us be consistent and give one to the unmarried man. I venture to suggest Mush, abbreviated to MH.
Convent. A place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness.
A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man, who has no gills.
Optimism. The doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.
An optimist is a proponent of the doctrine that black is white.
Patience. A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.
Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.
Peace, in international affairs, is a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves a glorious success.
Philanthropist. A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.
A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.
Physician -- One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well.
To bother about the best method of accomplishing an accidental result.
Politeness -- The most acceptable hypocrisy.
What is a democrat? One who believes that the republicans have ruined the country. What is a republican? One who believes that the democrats would ruin the country.
Eulogy. Praise of a person who has either the advantages of wealth and power, or the consideration to be dead.
Admiration; is our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
Pray. To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
A prejudice is a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.
The are and practice of selling one's credibility for future delivery.
Nominee. A modest gentleman shrinking from the distinction of private life and diligently seeking the honorable obscurity of public office.
The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
Insurrection. An unsuccessful revolution; disaffection's failure to substitute misrule for bad government.
Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
Saint. A dead sinner revised and edited.
Erudition. Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
Backbite. To speak of a man as you find him when he can't find you.
Success is the one unpardonable sin against one's fellows.
Take not God's name in vain; select a time when it will have effect.
Think twice before you speak to a friend in need.
Appeal. In law, to put the dice into the box for another throw.
Trial. A formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors.
Truth -- An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance.
They say that hens do cackle loudest when there is nothing vital in the eggs they have laid.
Bride. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
Wit. The salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.