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| Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce: born June 1842 died 1914 was a renowned American author, reporter, critic and satirist |
Quotes by Ambrose Bierce
An auctioneer is a man who proclaims with a hammer that he has picked a pocket with his tongue.The male is a member of the unconsidered or negligible gender. The male of the human race is commonly known to the female as Mere Man. The Genus has two varieties: good providers and bad providers.
Administration is an ingenious abstraction in politics, designed to receive the kicks and cuffs due to the premier or president.
An acquaintance is a person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
The future is that period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
The debauchee is one who has so earnestly pursued pleasure that he has had the misfortune to overtake it.
Logic is the art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
Responsibility is a detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of god, fate, fortune, luck or one’s neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.
Achievement is the death of endeavor and the birth of disgust.
Education is that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
The observatory is a place where astronomers conjecture away the guesses of their predecessors.
Politeness is the most acceptable hypocrisy.
Religion is the daughter of hope and fear explaining to ignorance the nature of the unexplainable.
Enthusiasm the distemper of youth; curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.
Beauty is the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
Contempt is the feeling of a prudent man for an enemy who is too formidable safely to be opposed.
An abstainer is a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
Optimism is the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong.
Perseverance is a lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves inglorious success.
History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
Destiny is the tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.
Laughter is an interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises.
Faith is the belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge of things without parallel.
Money is a blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part with it.
Even the laws of justice themselves cannot subsist without mixture of injustice.
The ghost is the outward and visible signs of an inward fear.
An opiate is an unlocked door in the prison of identity. It leads into the jail yard.
Happiness is an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
The bride is a woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
Patience is a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
A clairvoyant is a person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron; namely, that he is a blockhead.
A coward is one who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.
Deliberation is the act of examining one’s bread to determine which side it is buttered on.
A dentist is the Prestidigitator who, putting metal in one’s mouth, pulls coins out of one’s pockets.
An egotist is a person of low taste more interested in himself than in me.
Litigation is a machine which you go into as a pig and come out as a sausage.
Infancy is the period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, “Heaven lies about us.” The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.
Miss, is a title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the market.
The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of a remarkable Christian forbearance among men.
A bird in the hand is worth what it will bring.
A longer extract from his book: The Devil's Dictionary
Certain old men prefer to rise at dawn, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty stomach and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe years; the truth being that they are hearty and old, not because of their habits, but in spite of them. The reason we find only robust persons doing this thing is that it has killed all the others who have tried it.
