Aphorisms

Flattery’s the food of fools.

Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.

Pocket: the cradle of motive and the grave of conscience.

Patience: a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.

Diplomacy: the patriotic art of lying for one’s country.

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

Telephone: an invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

Peace: in international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

Marriage: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.

Love: a temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder.

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

Appeal: in law, to put the dice into the box for another throw.