Ambrose Bierce

Absurdity — a statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

Diary — a daily record of that part of one's life, which he can relate to himself without blushing.

Experience — the wisdom that enables us to recognize as an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

Love — a temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease, like caries and many other ailments, is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.

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.

Back — that part of your friend which it is your privilege to contemplate in your adversity.

Fiddle — an instrument to tickle human ears by friction of a horse's tail on the entrails of a cat.

Friendship — a ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul.

Historian — a broad-gauge gossip.

Mythology — the body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.

Contempt — the feeling of a prudent man for an enemy who is too formidable safely to be opposed.

Vote — the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

Plan — to bother about the best method of accomplishing an accidental result.

Justice — a commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.

Year — a period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.