Ambrose Bierce Quotes

696 Sourced Quotes

Truth is so good a thing that falsehood can not afford to be without it.

Ambrose Bierce
FLINT, n. A substance much in use as a material for hearts. Its composition is silica, 98.00; oxide of iron, 0.25; alumina, 0.25; water, 1.50. When an editor's heart is made, the water is commonly left out; in a lawyer's more water is added — and frozen.

Ambrose Bierce
Aborigines, n.: Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.

Ambrose Bierce
TAKE, v.t. To acquire, frequently by force but preferably by stealth.

Ambrose Bierce
UGLINESS, n. A gift of the gods to certain women, entailing virtue without humility.

Ambrose Bierce
PRIMATE, n. The head of a church, especially a State church supported by involuntary contributions. The Primate of England is the Archbishop of Canterbury, an amiable old gentleman, who occupies Lambeth Palace when living and Westminster Abbey when dead. He is commonly dead.

Ambrose Bierce
GNOSTICS, n. A sect of philosophers who tried to engineer a fusion between the early Christians and the Platonists. The former would not go into the caucus and the combination failed, greatly to the chagrin of the fusion managers.

Ambrose Bierce
COMMERCE, n. A kind of transaction in which A plunders from B the goods of C, and for compensation B picks the pocket of D of money belonging to E.

Ambrose Bierce
ETHNOLOGY, n. The science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as robbers, thieves, swindlers, dunces, lunatics, idiots and ethnologists.

Ambrose Bierce
TEDIUM, n. Ennui, the state or condition of one that is bored. Many fanciful derivations of the word have been affirmed, but so high an authority as Father Jape says that it comes from a very obvious source --the first words of the ancient Latin hymn _Te Deum Laudamus_. In this apparently natural derivation there is something that saddens.

Ambrose Bierce
ACCIDENT, n. An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws.

Ambrose Bierce
RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the conscience.

Ambrose Bierce
The speech of one who utters with his tongue what he thinks with his ear, and feels the pride of a creator in accomplishing the feat of a parrot. A means (under Providence) of setting up as a wit without a capital of sense.

Ambrose Bierce
INDIFFERENT, adj. Imperfectly sensible to distinctions among things.

Ambrose Bierce
Scribbler, n. A professional writer whose views are antagonistic to one's own.

Ambrose Bierce
One engaged in a commercial pursuit. A commercial pursuit is one in which the thing pursued is a dollar.

Ambrose Bierce
ACCOMPLICE, n. One associated with another in a crime, having guilty knowledge and complicity, as an attorney who defends a criminal, knowing him guilty. This view of the attorney's position in the matter has not hitherto commanded the assent of attorneys, no one having offered them a fee for assenting.

Ambrose Bierce
Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.

Ambrose Bierce
PREHISTORIC, adj. Belonging to an early period and a museum. Antedating the art and practice of perpetuating falsehood.

Ambrose Bierce
A comely female inhabiting the Mohammedan Paradise to make things cheery for the good Mussulman, whose belief in her existence marks a noble discontent with his earthly spouse, whom he denies a soul.

Ambrose Bierce
GRAVITATION, n. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportioned to the quantity of matter they contain-the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying illustration of how science, having made A the proof of B, makes B the proof of A.

Ambrose Bierce
URBANITY, n. The kind of civility that urban observers ascribe to dwellers in all cities but New York. Its commonest expression is heard in the words, "I beg your pardon," and it is not consistent with disregard of the rights of others.

Ambrose Bierce
LECTURER, n. One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience.

Ambrose Bierce
VITUPERATION, n. Saite, as understood by dunces and all such as suffer from an impediment in their wit.

Ambrose Bierce
DIAGNOSIS, n. A physician's forecast of disease by the patient's pulse and purse.

Ambrose Bierce
In theology, the state of a luckless mortal prenatally damned. The doctrine of reprobation was taught by Calvin, whose joy in it was somewhat marred by the sad sincerity of his conviction that although some are foredoomed to perdition, others are predestined to salvation.

Ambrose Bierce
BABE or BABY, n. A misshapen creature of no particular age, sex, or condition, chiefly remarkable for the violence of the sympathies and antipathies it excites in others, itself without sentiment or emotion.

Ambrose Bierce
DISABUSE, v.t. To present your neighbor with another and better error than the one which he has deemed advantageous to embrace.

Ambrose Bierce
IGNORAMUS, n. A person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself, and having certain other kinds that you know nothing about.

Ambrose Bierce
DEJEUNER, n. The breakfast of an American who has been in Paris. Variously pronounced.

Ambrose Bierce