Words matter. These are the best Ambrose Bierce Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
Consult: To seek approval for a course of action already decided upon.
Lawsuit: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.
Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me.
Experience – the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
Destiny: A tyrant’s authority for crime and a fool’s excuse for failure.
Battle, n., A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.
Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.
Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man – who has no gills.
Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
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.
Convent – a place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness.
Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.
Ability is commonly found to consist mainly in a high degree of solemnity.
Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is – it is her shadow.
Jealous, adj. Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.
Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
Ardor, n. The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.
Bride: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
Education, n.: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one’s voice.
Amnesty, n. The state’s magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.
Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.
Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.
Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.
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.
The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.
Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
Litigant. A person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bones.
It is evident that skepticism, while it makes no actual change in man, always makes him feel better.
Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion.
A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.
Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.
Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.
Genius – to know without having learned; to draw just conclusions from unknown premises; to discern the soul of things.
Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
Alien – an American sovereign in his probationary state.
Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
Sabbath – a weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.
Doubt is the father of invention.
Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.
The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.
Women in love are less ashamed than men. They have less to be ashamed of.
Impartial – unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.
Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.
Spring beckons! All things to the call respond; the trees are leaving and cashiers abscond.
Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.
The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.
Forgetfulness – a gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.
Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
Confidante: One entrusted by A with the secrets of B confided to herself by C.
Erudition – dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
Coward: One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.
Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue.
Duty – that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.
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.
Perseverance – a lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.
Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
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.
Liberty: One of Imagination’s most precious possessions.
There are four kinds of Homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.
The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify we give the name of knowledge.
