I is the first letter of the alphabet, the first word of the language, the first thought of the mind, the first object of affection.
EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
All that day he travelled, laying his course by the rounding sun. The forest seemed interminable; nowhere did he discover a break in it, not even a woodman’s road. He had not known that he lived in so wild a region. There was something uncanny in the revelation.
ABOMINABLE, adj. The quality of another’s opinions.
Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs.
A man is like a tree: in a forest of his fellows he will grow as straight as his generic and individual nature permits; alone in the open, he yields to the deforming stresses and tortions that environ him.
ADAM’S APPLE, n. A protuberance on the throat of a man, thoughtfully provided by Nature to keep the rope in place.
He wrote with terrible rapidity, the twig in his fingers rilling blood without renewal; but in the middle of a sentence his hands denied their service to his will, his arms fell to his sides, the book to the earth; and powerless to move or cry out, he found himself staring into the sharply drawn face and blank, dead eyes of his own mother, standing white and silent in the garments of the grave!
He who ignores the law of probabilities challenges an adversary that is seldom beaten.
Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.
Oyster, n. A slimy, gobby shellfish which civilization gives men the hardihood to eat without removing its entrails!
History does not forbid us to hope. But it forbids us to rely upon numbers; they will be against us. If history teaches anything worth learning it teaches that the majority of mankind is neither good nor wise. When government is founded upon the public conscience and the public intelligence the stability of states is a dream.
But a voting-machine that human ingenuity can not pervert, human ingenuity can not invent. That.
We must subdue our detestable habit of shaking hands with prosperous rascals and fawning upon the merely rich.
To expect that men who do not honorably and intelligently conduct their private affairs will honorably and intelligently conduct the affairs of the community is to be a fool.
He did all of this without thinking but with care.
Every murder proves that hanging is not altogether deterrent; every hanging, that it is somewhat deterrent – it deters the person hanged.
ALONE, adj. In bad company.
AMATEUR, n. A public nuisance who mistakes taste for skill, and confounds his ambition with his ability.
Ah, that we could fall into women’s arms without falling into their hands.