Top 985 Quotes & Sayings by Ambrose Bierce

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Ambrose Bierce.

Last updated on September 15, 2024.

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American short story writer, journalist, poet, and American Civil War veteran. His book The Devil's Dictionary was named as one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. His story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" has been described as "one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature", and his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians was named by the Grolier Club as one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900.

American - Journalist | June 24, 1842 - 1914

Source: Wikipedia

Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worth while.

Ambrose Bierce

Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.

Ambrose Bierce

Perseverance - a lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.

Ambrose Bierce

Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.

Ambrose Bierce

Education, n.: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

Ambrose Bierce

Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.

Ambrose Bierce

Coward: One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.

Ambrose Bierce

Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

Ambrose Bierce

Litigation: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.

Ambrose Bierce

Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.

Ambrose Bierce

Prejudice - a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.

Ambrose Bierce

Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.

Ambrose Bierce

Life - a spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.

Ambrose Bierce

Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.

Ambrose Bierce

Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

Ambrose Bierce

Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

Ambrose Bierce

Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

Ambrose Bierce

Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

Ambrose Bierce

Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.

Ambrose Bierce

The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.

Ambrose Bierce

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

Ambrose Bierce

Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

Ambrose Bierce

Doubt, indulged and cherished, is in danger of becoming denial; but if honest, and bent on thorough investigation, it may soon lead to full establishment of the truth.

Ambrose Bierce

Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.

Ambrose Bierce

History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

Ambrose Bierce

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.

Ambrose Bierce

There are four kinds of Homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.

Ambrose Bierce

Lawsuit: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.

Ambrose Bierce

Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.

Ambrose Bierce

Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.

Ambrose Bierce

Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is - it is her shadow.

Ambrose Bierce

Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.

Ambrose Bierce

The covers of this book are too far apart.

Ambrose Bierce

The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.

Ambrose Bierce

Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.

Ambrose Bierce

Battle, n., A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.

Ambrose Bierce

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

Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.

Ambrose Bierce

Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.

Ambrose Bierce

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.

Ambrose Bierce

Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.

Ambrose Bierce

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.

Ambrose Bierce

Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Ambrose Bierce

Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

Ambrose Bierce

Optimism - the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.

Ambrose Bierce

Bride: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.

Ambrose Bierce

To be positive is to be mistaken at the top of one's voice.

Ambrose Bierce

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

Ambrose Bierce

Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

Ambrose Bierce

Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue.

Ambrose Bierce

Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

Ambrose Bierce

Spring beckons! All things to the call respond; the trees are leaving and cashiers abscond.

Ambrose Bierce

Politeness, n: The most acceptable hypocrisy.

Ambrose Bierce

Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

Ambrose Bierce

To apologize is to lay the foundation for a future offense.

Ambrose Bierce

When you doubt, abstain.

Ambrose Bierce

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.

Ambrose Bierce

Present, n. That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.

Ambrose Bierce

Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

Ambrose Bierce

Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.

Ambrose Bierce