Genius – to know without having learned; to draw just conclusions from unknown premises; to discern the soul of things.
Erudition – dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
Amnesty, n. The state’s magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.
To be positive is to be mistaken at the top of one’s voice.
Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.
Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
Curiosity, n. An objectionable quality of the female mind. The desire to know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul.
Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is – it is her shadow.
Wit – the salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.
Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke.
Genealogy, n. An account of one’s descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own.
Famous, adj.: Conspicuously miserable.
Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.
Cabbage: a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man’s head.
Battle, n., A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.
Abscond – to move in a mysterious way, commonly with the property of another.
Duty – that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
Clairvoyant, n.: A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron – namely, that he is a blockhead.
Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.
Ambidextrous, adj.: Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left.