AMBROSE BIERCE QUOTES
American author (1842-1914)
Reason is fallible and virtue invincible; the winds vary and the needle forsakes the pole, but stupidity never errs and never intermits.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
Death is not the end; there remains the litigation over the estate.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
History, n. an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
Man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
Patience, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
Reality, n. The dream of a mad philosopher. That which would remain in the cupel if one should assay a phantom. The nucleus of a vacuum.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
Marriage, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
Patriotism deliberately and with folly aforethought subordinates the interests of a whole to the interests of a part. Worse still, the fraction so favored is determined by an accident of birth or residence.
AMBROSE BIERCE
A Cynic Looks at Life
To those who view the voyage of life from the port of departure the bark that has accomplished any considerable distance appears already in close approach to the farther shore.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"The Death of Halpin Frayser"
"Immoral" is the judgment of the stalled ox on the gamboling lamb.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
When publicly censured our first instinct is to make everybody a codefendant.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
Childhood, n. The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth -- two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
Beauty, n. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
When God makes a beautiful woman, the devil opens a new register.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
Youth is Gilead, in which is balm for every wound.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"The Moonlit Road"
The creator and arbiter of beauty is the heart; to the male rattlesnake the female rattlesnake is the loveliest thing in nature.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
He to whom the portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and silence in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown experience needs not to be told what another world it all is - how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. The trees group themselves differently; they draw closer together, as if in fear. The very silence has another quality than the silence of the day. And it is full of half-heard whispers - whispers that startle - ghosts of sounds long dead. There are living sounds, too, such as are never heard under other conditions: notes of strange night-birds, the cries of small animals in sudden encounters with stealthy foes or in their dreams, a rustling in the dead leaves - it may be the leap of a wood-rat, it may be the footfall of a panther. What caused the breaking of that twig? - what the low, alarmed twittering in that bushful of birds? There are sounds without a name, forms without substance, translations in space of objects which have not been seen to move, movements wherein nothing is observed to change its place. Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live!
AMBROSE BIERCE
"A Tough Tussle"