Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Ambrose Bierce.
Last updated on October 10, 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.
Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worth while.
Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.
Perseverance - a lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.
Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.
Education, n.: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.
Coward: One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.
Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
Litigation: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.
Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.
Prejudice - a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.
Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
Life - a spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.
Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.
Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.
The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.
Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
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.
Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
There are four kinds of Homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.
Lawsuit: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.
Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is - it is her shadow.
Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
The covers of this book are too far apart.
The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.
Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.
Battle, n., A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.
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.
Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.
Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.
Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
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.
Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
Optimism - the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.
Bride: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
To be positive is to be mistaken at the top of one's voice.
Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.
Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue.
Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
Spring beckons! All things to the call respond; the trees are leaving and cashiers abscond.
Politeness, n: The most acceptable hypocrisy.
Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.
To apologize is to lay the foundation for a future offense.
When you doubt, abstain.
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.
Present, n. That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.
Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.