Explore Quotations, Proverbs & Sayings

«HATRED, n. A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another's superiority.»

«GALLOWS, n. A stage for the performance of miracle plays, in which the leading actor is translated to heaven. In this country the gallows is chiefly remarkable for the number of persons who escape it.Whether on the gallows high Or where blood flows the reddest, The noblest place for man to die -- Is where he died the deadest. --(Old play)»

«EFFECT, n. The second of two phenomena which always occur together in the same order. The first, called a Cause, is said to generate the other --which is no more sensible than it would be for one who has never seen a dog except in the pursuit of a rabbit to declare the rabbit the cause of a dog.»

«EJECTION, n. An approved remedy for the disease of garrulity. It is also much used in cases of extreme poverty.»

«ELYSIUM, n. An imaginary delightful country which the ancients foolishly believed to be inhabited by the spirits of the good. This ridiculous and mischievous fable was swept off the face of the earth by the early Christians --may their souls be happy in Heaven!»

«EMBALM, v.i. To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew. The modern metallic burial casket is a step in the same direction, and many a dead man who ought now to be ornamenting his neighbor's lawn as a tree, or enriching his table as a bunch of radishes, is doomed to a long inutility. We shall get him after awhile if we are spared, but in the meantime the violet and rose are languishing for a nibble at his _glutoeus maximus_.»

«ENOUGH, pro. All there is in the world if you like it.Enough is as good as a feast --for that matter Enougher's as good as a feast for the platter. --Arbely C. Strunk»

«ENTERTAINMENT, n. Any kind of amusement whose inroads stop short of death by injection.»

«EUCHARIST, n. A sacred feast of the religious sect of Theophagi. A dispute once unhappily arose among the members of this sect as to what it was that they ate. In this controversy some five hundred thousand have already been slain, and the question is still unsettled.»

«ESOTERIC, adj. Very particularly abstruse and consummately occult. The ancient philosophies were of two kinds, --_exoteric_, those that the philosophers themselves could partly understand, and _esoteric_, those that nobody could understand. It is the latter that have most profoundly affected modern thought and found greatest acceptance in our time.»