Ambrose Bierce Quotes

696 Sourced Quotes

PITIFUL, adj. The state of an enemy or opponent after an imaginary encounter with oneself.

Ambrose Bierce
POETRY, n. A form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the Magazines.

Ambrose Bierce
PILGRIM, n. A traveler that is taken seriously. A Pilgrim Father was one who [was] not permitted to sing psalms through his nose [in Europe], followed it to Massachusetts, where he could personate God according to the dictates of his conscience.

Ambrose Bierce
ORTHOGRAPHY, n. The science of spelling by the eye instead of the ear.

Ambrose Bierce
EAT, v.i. To perform successively (and successfully) the functions of mastication, humectation, and deglutition.

Ambrose Bierce
Before undergoing a surgical operation, arrange your temporal affairs. You may live.

Ambrose Bierce
Recollect, v. To recall with additions something not previously known.

Ambrose Bierce
International arbitration may be defined as the substitution of many burning questions for a smoldering one

Ambrose Bierce
MISERICORDE, n. A dagger which in mediaeval warfare was used by the foot soldier to remind an unhorsed knight that he was mortal.

Ambrose Bierce
ULTIMATUM, n. In diplomacy, a last demand before resorting to concessions.

Ambrose Bierce
Picture, n. A representation in two dimensions of something wearisome in three.

Ambrose Bierce
REBEL, n. A proponent of a new misrule who has failed to establish it.

Ambrose Bierce
PICKANINNY, n. The young of the "Procyanthropos", or "Americanus dominans". It is small, black and charged with political fatalities.

Ambrose Bierce
The sum of religion, says Pythagoras, is to be like him thou worshipest. Had Pythagoras lived in our day he would have seen his mistake. The sum of modern religion is to make him thou worshipest like unto thyself.

Ambrose Bierce
A king's staff of office, the sign and symbol of his authority. It was originally a mace with which the sovereign admonished his jester and vetoed ministerial measures by breaking the bones of their proponents.

Ambrose Bierce
MINISTER, n. An agent of a higher power with a lower responsibility. In diplomacy, an officer sent into a foreign country as the visible embodiment of his sovereign's hostility.

Ambrose Bierce
Me, pro. The objectionable case of I. The personal pronoun in English has three cases, the dominative, the objectionable and the oppressive. Each is all three.

Ambrose Bierce
PRESBYTERIAN, n. One who holds the conviction that the government authorities of the Church should be called presbyters.

Ambrose Bierce
What a woman most admires in a man is distinction among men. What a man most admires in a woman is devotion to himself.

Ambrose Bierce
MUGWUMP, n. In politics one afflicted with self-respect and addicted to the vice of independence. A term of contempt.

Ambrose Bierce
Molecule, n.: The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. It is distinguished from the corpuscle, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter, by a closer resemblance to the atom, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter... The ion differs from the molecule, the corpuscle and the atom in that it is an ion...

Ambrose Bierce
GUNPOWDER, n. An agency employed by civilized nations for the settlement of disputes which might become troublesome if left unadjusted. By most writers the invention of gunpowder is ascribed to the Chinese, but not upon very convincing evidence. Milton says it was invented by the devil to dispel angels with, and this opinion seems to derive some support from the scarcity of angels.

Ambrose Bierce
A cheap and easy cynicism rails at everything. The master of the art accomplishes the formidable task of discrimination.

Ambrose Bierce
LIVER, n. A large red organ thoughtfully provided by nature to be bilious with. The liver is heaven's best gift to the goose; without it that bird would be unable to supply us with the Strasbourg "pate".

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

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
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
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
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