Quote#Poetry
Incompossible, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two…
Quote byAmbrose Bierce · 1842–1914
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: The Devil's Dictionary (1911).
English (original)
Incompossible, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both — as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man.
— Ambrose Bierce
More from Ambrose Bierce
This is a simple story of a battle; such a tale as may be told by a soldier who is no writer to a reader who is no soldier.
Peyton Fahrquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.
True, more than a half of the green graves in the Grafton cemetery are marked "Unknown," and sometimes it occurs that one thinks of the contradiction involved in "honoring the memory" of him of whom no memory remains to honor; but the …
The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of remarkable Christian forbearance among men — were it not for a mawkish humanitarianism, coupled with imperfect digestive powers, we should devour our young, as Nature intended.
An army's bravest men are its cowards. The death which they would not meet at the hands of the enemy they will meet at the hands of their officers, with never a flinching.