Quotes by Ambrose Bierce
(1842 - 1914)

Category	Quote	E-Mail this quote
Abstinence	Abstainer, n: A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
Absurdity	Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Acquaintances	Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Admiration	Admiration, n: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves
America	Every time Europe looks across the Atlantic to see the American eagle, it observes only the rear end of an ostrich.
Bible	Scriptures, n. The sacred book of our holy religion, as distingushed from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
Books	The covers of this book are too far apart.
Bores	Bore, n.: A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
Boys	The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of a remarkable Christian forebearance among men.
Business	The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
Calamity	Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
Childhood	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 old age.
Christians	Christian, n. One who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistant with a life of sin.
Clergy	Clergyman, n. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.
Conservative	Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distiguished from a liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
Corporations	Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
Critics	Critic, n. A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him.
Critics	Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.
Cynics	Cynic, n. A blackgaurd whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
Diagnosis	Diagnosis: A physician's forecast of disease by the patient's pulse and purse.
Diplomacy	Diplomacy: n. The patriotic art of lying for one's country.
Duty	Duty, n. That which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
Egoism	Egoist: A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me. - (Birece's Dictionary)
Faith	Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parellel.
Food	Cabbage: A... vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head.
Grave	Grave: A place in which the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student.
Happiness	Happiness, n. An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another
Hatred	Hatred: A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another's superiority.
Impiety	Impiety: n. Your irreverence toward my diety.
Intelligence	In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
Justice	Justice, n. A commodity whch in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.
Lawsuits	Lawsuit, n. A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.
Lawyers	Lawyer, n. One skilled in the circumvention of the law.
Logic	If sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man, and one man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds, apparently sixty men can dig a posthole in one second.
Loneliness	Alone-adj. In bad company.
Marriage	Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Misfortune	Misfortune: The kind of fortune that never misses.
Opera	Opera, n. A play representing life in another world whose inhabitants have no speech but song, no motions but gestures, and no postures but attitudes.
Optimism	Optimism, n. The doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including the ugly.
Patience	Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue.
Patriotism	In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary, patriotism is defined as the lst resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first.
Patriotism	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 that it is the first. - (American author)
Peace	Peace, n. In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
Politicians	In legislative bodies, it is customary to mention all members as honorable; as, "the honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur."
Politics	Politics, n. strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
Positivity	To be positive: To be mistaken at the top of one's voice.
Prayer	Pray, v. To ask the laws of the universe to be nulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
Quotation	Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
Saints	Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.
Thinking	Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum (I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.)
Thinking	Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.
Weather	Barometer, n.: An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having.

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