Quotes by Ambrose Bierce

• Jealous, adj. Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.
• Litigation: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.
• Litigant. A person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bones.
• Life - a spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.
• Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
• Lawsuit: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.
• Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.
• It is evident that skepticism, while it makes no actual change in man, always makes him feel better.
• Laziness. Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.
• Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.
• Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
• Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
• Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
• Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
• Prejudice - a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.
• Land: A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure.
• Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
• Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
• Irreligion - the principal one of the great faiths of the world.
• Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worth while.
• Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.
• Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.
• Optimism - the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.
• Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.
• Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue.
• Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.
• Perseverance - a lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.
• Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
• Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.
• Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.
• Politeness, n: The most acceptable hypocrisy.
• Egotism, n: Doing the New York Times crossword puzzle with a pen.
• Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me.
• Eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.
• Education, n.: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
• Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
• Doubt, indulged and cherished, is in danger of becoming denial; but if honest, and bent on thorough investigation, it may soon lead to full establishment of the truth.
• Eulogy. Praise of a person who has either the advantages of wealth and power, or the consideration to be dead.
• Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
• Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.
• Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
• Enthusiasm - a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.
• Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
• Duty - that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
• Doubt is the father of invention.
• Doubt begins only at the last frontiers of what is possible.
• Dog - a kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship.
• Divorce: a resumption of diplomatic relations and rectification of boundaries.
• Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.
• Deliberation, n.: The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.
• Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.
• Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.
• Famous, adj.: Conspicuously miserable.
• In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
• Edible - good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
• Immortality: A toy which people cry for, And on their knees apply for, Dispute, contend and lie for, And if allowed Would be right proud Eternally to die for.
• Rum, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers.
• Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
• Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
• Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
• Present, n. That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.
• Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.
• Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.
• Incompatibility. In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination.
• Bride: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
• Impartial - unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.
• Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.
• Fidelity - a virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.
• I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London.
• History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
• Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.
• Genius - to know without having learned; to draw just conclusions from unknown premises; to discern the soul of things.
• Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own.
• Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
• Friendless. Having no favors to bestow. Destitute of fortune. Addicted to utterance of truth and common sense.
• Fork: An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth.
• Forgetfulness - a gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.
• Impiety. Your irreverence toward my deity.
• Admiral. That part of a warship which does the talking while the figurehead does the thinking.
• Ardor, n. The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.
• Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.
• Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.
• An egotist is a person of low taste - more interested in himself than in me.
• Amnesty, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.
• Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.
• Ambidextrous, adj.: Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left.
• Alliance - in international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.
• All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.
• Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
• Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
• Barometer, n.: An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having.
• Acquaintance. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
• Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.
• Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
• Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
• Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
• Abscond - to move in a mysterious way, commonly with the property of another.
• Ability is commonly found to consist mainly in a high degree of solemnity.
• A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.
• A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms agains himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.
• A man is known by the company he organizes.
• Alien - an American sovereign in his probationary state.
• 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.
• Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
• Coward: One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.
• Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
• Convent - a place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness.
• Consult: To seek approval for a course of action already decided upon.
• Consul - in American politics, a person who having failed to secure an office from the people is given one by the Administration on condition that he leave the country.
• Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.
• Confidante: One entrusted by A with the secrets of B confided to herself by C.
• Bacchus, n.: A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.
• Clairvoyant, n.: A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron - namely, that he is a blockhead.
• Backbite. To speak of a man as you find him when he can't find you.
• Sabbath - a weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.
• Cabbage: a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head.
• Historian - a broad-gauge gossip.
• Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.
• Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
• Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.
• Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
• Beauty, n: the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
• Battle, n., A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.
• Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.
• Compromise, n. Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to have, and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due.
• Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
• The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.
• The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
• The covers of this book are too far apart.
• The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.
• Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.
• Suffrage, noun. Expression of opinion by means of a ballot. The right of suffrage (which is held to be both a privilege and a duty) means, as commonly interpreted, the right to vote for the man of another man's choice, and is highly prized.
• Spring beckons! All things to the call respond; the trees are leaving and cashiers abscond.
• Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
• Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.
• To apologize is to lay the foundation for a future offense.
• To be positive is to be mistaken at the top of one's voice.
• The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.
• There are four kinds of Homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.
• Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.
• Women in love are less ashamed than men. They have less to be ashamed of.
• Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke.
• Wit - the salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.
• Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is - it is her shadow.
• When you doubt, abstain.
• What is a democrat? One who believes that the republicans have ruined the country. What is a republican? One who believes that the democrats would ruin the country.
• We submit to the majority because we have to. But we are not compelled to call our attitude of subjection a posture of respect.
• We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.
• Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
• Trial. A formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors.
• Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.
• The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify we give the name of knowledge.
• Success is simply the refusal to give up, and occasionally wearing a cap that could özü people for minds underwater!