Top 100 Bierce's Quotes
#1. 'The Devil's Dictionary' reads like a collection of great Twitter posts. And as people do with tweets, they can swipe Bierce's best lines and recite them as nearly their own. The reflected glory of reposting.
Victor LaValle
#2. Homo Creator's testimony to the sound construction and fine finish of Deus Creatus. A popular form of abjection, having an element of pride.
Ambrose Bierce
#3. A rabbit's foot may bring good luck to you, but it brought none to the rabbit.
Ambrose Bierce
#4. ELECTOR, n. One who enjoys the sacred privilege of voting for the man of another man's choice.
Ambrose Bierce
#5. An appellate court which reverses the judgment of a popular author's contemporaries, the appellant being his obscure competitor.
Ambrose Bierce
#7. ANTIPATHY, n. The sentiment inspired by one's friend's friend.
Ambrose Bierce
#8. ROMANCE, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are. In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to probability, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination ...
Ambrose Bierce
#9. MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.
Ambrose Bierce
#10. OUT-OF-DOORS, n. That part of one's environment upon which no government has been able to collect taxes. Chiefly useful to inspire poets.
Ambrose Bierce
#11. HATRED, n. A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another's superiority.
Ambrose Bierce
#12. Legitimate authority to be, to do or to have; as the right to be a king, the right to do one's neighbor, the right to have measles, and the like.
Ambrose Bierce
#13. Self-evident, adj. Evident to one's self and to nobody else.
Ambrose Bierce
#14. Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first.
Ambrose Bierce
#15. J, n. A consonant in English, but some nations use it as a vowel ... from a Latin verb, "jacere", "to throw," because when a stone is thrown at a dog the dog's tail assumes that shape.
Ambrose Bierce
#16. HAND, n. A singular instrument worn at the end of the human arm and commonly thrust into somebody's pocket.
Ambrose Bierce
#17. ROPE, n. An obsolescent appliance for reminding assassins that they too are mortal. It is put about the neck and remains in place one's whole life long.
Ambrose Bierce
#18. PROPERTY, n. Any material thing, having no particular value, that may be held by A against the cupidity of B. Whatever gratifies the passion for possession in one and disappoints it in all others. The object of man's brief rapacity and long indifference.
Ambrose Bierce
#19. Suddenly to change one's opinions and go over to another party. The most notable flop on record was that of Saul of Tarsus, who has been severely criticised as a turn-coat by some of our partisan journals.
Ambrose Bierce
#20. PLATONIC, adj. Pertaining to the philosophy of Socrates. Platonic Love is a fool's name for the affection between a disability and a frost.
Ambrose Bierce
#21. Consult, v.t. To seek another's approval of a course already decided on. Contempt, n. The feeling of a prudent man for an enemy who is too formidable safely to be opposed.
Ambrose Bierce
#22. QUORUM, n. A sufficient number of members of a deliberative body to have their own way and their own way of having it. In the U.S. Senate a quorum consists of the chairman of the Committee on Finance and a messenger from the White House.
Ambrose Bierce
#23. Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own.
Ambrose Bierce
#24. Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
Ambrose Bierce
#25. Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.
Ambrose Bierce
#26. 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
#27. QUIXOTIC, adj. Absurdly chivalric, like Don Quixote. An insight into the beauty and excellence of this incomparable adjective is unhappily denied to him who has the misfortune to know that the gentleman's name is pronounced Ke-ho-tay.
Ambrose Bierce
#28. In neither taste nor precision is any man's practice a court of last appeal, for writers all, both great and small, are habitual sinners against the light; and their accuser is cheerfully aware that his own work will supply ... many 'awful examples' ...
Ambrose Bierce
#29. Honorable, adj.: Afflicted with an impediment in one's reach. In legislative bodies, it is customary to mention all members as honorable; as, "the honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur.".
Ambrose Bierce
#30. PROPHECY, n. The art and practice of selling one's credibility for future delivery.
Ambrose Bierce
#31. ACKNOWLEDGE, v.t. To confess. Acknowledgment of one another's faults is the highest duty imposed by our love of truth.
Ambrose Bierce
#32. The game of discontent has its rules, and he who disregards them cheats. It is not permitted to you to wish to add another's advantages or possessions to your own; you are permitted only to wish to be another.
Ambrose Bierce
#33. Amnesty, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.
Ambrose Bierce
#34. Here's to woman! Would that we could fold into her arms without falling into her hands.
Ambrose Bierce
#35. UXORIOUSNESS, n. A perverted affection that has strayed to one's own wife.
Ambrose Bierce
#36. CONSULT, v.i. To seek another's disapproval of a course already decided on.
Ambrose Bierce
#37. AMERICANISM, n. 1) The desire to purge America of all those qualities which make it a more or less tolerable place in which to live; 2) The ability to simultaneously kiss ass, follow your boss's orders, swallow a pay cut, piss in a bottle, cower in fear of job loss, and brag about your freedom.
Ambrose Bierce
#38. RUIN, v. To destroy. Specifically, to destroy a maid's belief in the virtue of maids.
Ambrose Bierce
#39. SATIRE, n. An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness.
Ambrose Bierce
#40. Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
Ambrose Bierce
#41. To be positive is to be mistaken at the top of one's voice.
Ambrose Bierce
#42. APOTHECARY, n. The physician's accomplice, undertaker's benefactor and grave worm's provider
Ambrose Bierce
#43. ACCUSE, v.t. To affirm another's guilt or unworth; most commonly as a justification of ourselves for having wronged him.
Ambrose Bierce
#44. 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.
Ambrose Bierce
#45. Nature's fortuitous manifestation of her purposeless objectionableness.
Ambrose Bierce
#46. Take not God's name in vain; select a time when it will have effect.
Ambrose Bierce
#47. WIDOW, n. A pathetic figure that the Christian world has agreed to take humorously, although Christ's tenderness towards widows was one of the most marked features of his character.
Ambrose Bierce
#48. 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
#49. FIDDLE, n. An instrument to tickle human ears by friction of a horse's tail on the entrails of a cat.
Ambrose Bierce
#50. COMFORT, n. A state of mind produced by contemplation of a neighbor's uneasiness.
Ambrose Bierce
#51. MULTITUDE, n. A crowd; the source of political wisdom and virtue. In a republic, the object of the statesman's adoration.
Ambrose Bierce
#52. LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.
Ambrose Bierce
#53. Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.
Ambrose Bierce
#54. HUMORIST, n. A plague that would have softened down the hoar austerity of Pharaoh's heart and persuaded him to dismiss Israel with his best wishes, cat-quick.
Ambrose Bierce
#55. It has been observed
that one's nose is never so happy as when thrust into the affairs of
others from which some physiologists have drawn the inference that
the nose is devoid of the sense of smell.
Ambrose Bierce
#56. 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.
Ambrose Bierce
#57. A subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship ... [H]is master works for the means wherewith to purchase the idle wag of the Solomonic tail, seasoned with a look of tolerant recognition.
Ambrose Bierce
#58. Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
Ambrose Bierce
#59. INFALAPSARIAN, n. One who ventures to believe that Adam need not have sinned unless he had a mind to - in opposition to the Supralapsarians, who hold that that luckless person's fall was decreed from the beginning.
Ambrose Bierce
#60. INTERPRETER, n. One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.
Ambrose Bierce
#61. ZIGZAG, v.t. To move forward uncertainly, from side to side, as one carrying the white man's burden.
Ambrose Bierce
#62. Responsibility, n. 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.
Ambrose Bierce
#63. ABRUPT, adj. Sudden, without ceremony, like the arrival of a cannon- shot and the departure of the soldier whose interests are most affected by it. Dr. Samuel Johnson beautifully said of another author's ideas that they were concatenated without abruption.
Ambrose Bierce
#64. LEAD, n. A heavy blue-gray metal much used in giving stability to light lovers - particularly to those who love not wisely but other men's wives.
Ambrose Bierce
#65. TABLE D'HOTE, n. A caterer's thrifty concession to the universal passion for irresponsibility.
Ambrose Bierce
#66. Mammon, n. The god of the world's leading religion. His chief temple is in the city of New York
Ambrose Bierce
#67. In the algebra of psychology, X stands for a woman's heart.
Ambrose Bierce
#68. When you have made a catalogue of your friend's faults it is only fair to supply him with a duplicate, so that he may know yours.
Ambrose Bierce
#69. Deliberation, n.: The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.
Ambrose Bierce
#70. FOLLY, n. That "gift and faculty divine" whose creative and controlling energy inspires Man's mind, guides his actions and adorns his life.
Ambrose Bierce
#71. PRIVATE, n. A military gentleman with a field-marshal's baton in his knapsack and an impediment in his hope.
Ambrose Bierce
#72. 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
#73. MISCREANT, n. A person of the highest degree of unworth. Etymologically, the word means unbeliever, and its present signification may be regarded as theology's noblest contribution to the development of our language.
Ambrose Bierce
#74. 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.
Ambrose Bierce
#75. ELEGY, n. A composition in verse, in which, without employing any of the methods of humor, the writer aims to produce in the reader's mind the dampest kind of dejection.
Ambrose Bierce
#76. TRICHINOSIS, n. The pig's reply to proponents of porcophagy.
Ambrose Bierce
#78. TZETZE (or TSETSE) FLY, n. An African insect ("Glossina morsitans") whose bite is commonly regarded as nature's most efficacious remedy for insomnia, though some patients prefer that of the American novelist ("Mendax interminabilis").
Ambrose Bierce
#79. Diplomacy, n.: The patriotic art of lying for one's country.
Ambrose Bierce
#80. LAST, n. A shoemaker's implement, named by a frowning Providence as opportunity to the maker of puns.
Ambrose Bierce
#81. Scribbler, n. A professional writer whose views are antagonistic to one's own.
Ambrose Bierce
#82. 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.
Ambrose Bierce
#83. So I say a name, even if self-bestowed, is better than a number. In the register of the potter's field I shall soon have both. What wealth!
Ambrose Bierce
#84. ART, n. This word has no definition. Its origin is related by the ingenious Father Gassalasca Jape as "One day a wag - what would the wretch be at? Shifted a letter of the cipher RAT, And said it was a god's name! ... "
Ambrose Bierce
#85. INTENTION, n. The mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of an involuntary act.
Ambrose Bierce
#87. 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
#88. NOTORIETY, n. The fame of one's competitor for public honors. The kind of renown most accessible and acceptable to mediocrity. A Jacob's-ladder leading to the vaudeville stage, with angels ascending and descending.
Ambrose Bierce
#89. Inexpedient: Not calculated to advance one's interests.
Ambrose Bierce
#90. Crowned with leaves of the laurel. In England the Poet Laureate is an officer of the sovereign's court, acting as dancing skeleton at every royal feast and singing-mute at every royal funeral.
Ambrose Bierce
#91. A single swallow, it is said, devours ten millions of insects every year. The supplying of these insects I take to be a signal instance of the Creator's bounty in providing for the lives of His creatures.
Ambrose Bierce
#92. Dog - a kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship.
Ambrose Bierce
#93. Insurrection. An unsuccessful revolution; disaffection's failure to substitute misrule for bad government.
Ambrose Bierce
#94. 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.
Ambrose Bierce
#95. GHOST, n. The outward and visible sign of an inward fear. - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Chet Williamson
#96. PERIPATETIC, adj. Walking about. Relating to the philosophy of Aristotle, who, while expounding it, moved from place to place in order to avoid his pupil's objections. A needless precaution - they knew no more of the matter than he.
Ambrose Bierce
#97. Book - Learning : The dunce's derisive term for all knowledge that transcends his own impertinent ignorance.
Ambrose Bierce
#98. Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Ambrose Bierce
#99. There's nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don't know.
Ambrose Bierce
#100. Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.
Ambrose Bierce
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