Bierce, Ambrose
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Bierce, Ambrose
Duty. That which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
Bierce, Ambrose
Duty
The covers of this book are too far apart.
Bierce, Ambrose
Critics and Criticism
Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
Bierce, Ambrose
Calamity
A coward is one who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.
Bierce, Ambrose
Coward and Cowardice
To be positive: to be mistaken at the top of one s voice.
Bierce, Ambrose
Certainty
Deliberation. The act of examining one s bread to determine which side it is buttered on.
Bierce, Ambrose
Deliberation
Dog. A kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world s worship.
Bierce, Ambrose
Dogs
Bore -- a person who talks when you wish him to listen.
Bierce, Ambrose
Bores and Boredom
Creditor. One of a tribe of savages dwelling beyond the Financial Straits and dreaded for their desolating incursions.
Bierce, Ambrose
Credit
Destiny. A tyrant s authority for crime and a fool s excuse for failure.
Bierce, Ambrose
Destiny
Opiate. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard.
Bierce, Ambrose
Drugs
Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.
Bierce, Ambrose
Experience
Consul. In American politics, a person who having failed to secure an office from the people is given one by the Administration on condition that he leave the country.
Bierce, Ambrose
Diplomacy
Experience. The wisdom that enables us to recognize in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
Bierce, Ambrose
Experience
Egotist. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than me.
Bierce, Ambrose
Egotism
Future: That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
Bierce, Ambrose
Future
A cynic is a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, and not as they ought to be.
Bierce, Ambrose
Cynics and Cynicism
Corporation. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
Bierce, Ambrose
Business
Don t steal; thou it never thus compete successfully in business. Cheat.
Bierce, Ambrose
Business
Forgetfulness. A gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.
Bierce, Ambrose
Debt
Compromise. 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.
Bierce, Ambrose
Compromise
Education is that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
Bierce, Ambrose
Education
The Senate is a body of old men charged with high duties and misdemeanors.
Bierce, Ambrose
Congress
An egotist is a person interested in himself than in me!
Bierce, Ambrose
Egotism
Incompatibility. In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination.
Bierce, Ambrose
Marriage
An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
Bierce, Ambrose
History and Historians
Historian. A broad -- gauge gossip.
Bierce, Ambrose
History and Historians
The gambling known as business looks with severe disfavor on the business known as gambling.
Bierce, Ambrose
Gambling
To apologize is to lay the foundation for a future offense.
Bierce, Ambrose
Forgiveness
The world has suffered more from the ravages of ill-advised marriages than from virginity.
Bierce, Ambrose
Marriage
Faith. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Bierce, Ambrose
Faith
Marriage. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
Bierce, Ambrose
Marriage
Fidelity. A virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.
Bierce, Ambrose
Fidelity
Habit is a shackle for the free.
Bierce, Ambrose
Habit
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.
Bierce, Ambrose
Food and Eating
Miss: A title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the market. Miss, Misses (Mrs.) and Mister (Mr.) are the three most distinctly disagreeable words in the language, in sound and sense. Two are corruptions of Mistress, the other of Master. If we must have them, let us be consistent and give one to the unmarried man. I venture to suggest Mush, abbreviated to MH.
Bierce, Ambrose
Names
Happiness is an agreeable sensation, arising from contemplating the misery of others.
Bierce, Ambrose
Happiness
Peace, in international affairs, is a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
Bierce, Ambrose
Peace
Alien. An American sovereign in his probationary state.
Bierce, Ambrose
Immigration
Physician -- One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well.
Bierce, Ambrose
Physicians
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.
Bierce, Ambrose
Insurance
Life. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.
Bierce, Ambrose
Life and Living
A man is known by the company he organizes.
Bierce, Ambrose
Management
Impiety. Your irreverence toward my deity.
Bierce, Ambrose
Irreverence
Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke.
Bierce, Ambrose
Jokes and Jokers
A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Bierce, Ambrose
Love
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify.
Bierce, Ambrose
Knowledge
Learning. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
Bierce, Ambrose
Learning
Laziness. Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.
Bierce, Ambrose
Laziness
Litigant. A person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bones.
Bierce, Ambrose
Law Suits
Before undergoing a surgical operation, arrange your temporal affairs. You may live.
Bierce, Ambrose
Medicine
Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.
Bierce, Ambrose
Impartiality
Laughter -- An interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious and, though intermittent, incurable.
Bierce, Ambrose
Laughter
An accident is an inevitable occurrence due to the actions of immutable natural laws.
Bierce, Ambrose
Misfortunes
Optimism. The doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.
Bierce, Ambrose
Optimism
What is a democrat? One who believes that the republicans have ruined the country. What is a republican? One who believes that the democrats would ruin the country.
Bierce, Ambrose
Politicians and Politics
To bother about the best method of accomplishing an accidental result.
Bierce, Ambrose
Planning
An optimist is a proponent of the doctrine that black is white.
Bierce, Ambrose
Optimism
Patience. A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.
Bierce, Ambrose
Patience
Philanthropist. A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.
Bierce, Ambrose
Philanthropists
A prejudice is a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.
Bierce, Ambrose
Prejudice
The are and practice of selling one s credibility for future delivery.
Bierce, Ambrose
Prophecy
A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
Bierce, Ambrose
Philosophers and Philosophy
Pray. To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
Bierce, Ambrose
Prayer
Take not God s name in vain; select a time when it will have effect.
Bierce, Ambrose
Swearing
Eulogy. Praise of a person who has either the advantages of wealth and power, or the consideration to be dead.
Bierce, Ambrose
Praise
Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.
Bierce, Ambrose
Patriotism
Admiration; is our polite recognition of another s resemblance to ourselves.
Bierce, Ambrose
Praise
Convent. A place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness.
Bierce, Ambrose
Nuns
Politeness -- The most acceptable hypocrisy.
Bierce, Ambrose
Politeness
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.
Bierce, Ambrose
Philosophers and Philosophy
Saint. A dead sinner revised and edited.
Bierce, Ambrose
Saints
A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man, who has no gills.
Bierce, Ambrose
Oceans
A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves a glorious success.
Bierce, Ambrose
Perseverance
Truth -- An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance.
Bierce, Ambrose
Truth
Backbite. To speak of a man as you find him when he can t find you.
Bierce, Ambrose
Slander
Erudition. Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
Bierce, Ambrose
Scholars and Scholarship
Appeal. In law, to put the dice into the box for another throw.
Bierce, Ambrose
Trials
Insurrection. An unsuccessful revolution; disaffection s failure to substitute misrule for bad government.
Bierce, Ambrose
Rebellion
Success is the one unpardonable sin against one s fellows.
Bierce, Ambrose
Success
Trial. A formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors.
Bierce, Ambrose
Trials
Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Bierce, Ambrose
Religion
Nominee. A modest gentleman shrinking from the distinction of private life and diligently seeking the honorable obscurity of public office.
Bierce, Ambrose
Public Office
The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
Bierce, Ambrose
Quotations
Think twice before you speak to a friend in need.
Bierce, Ambrose
Thoughts and Thinking
Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
Bierce, Ambrose
Revolutions and Revolutionaries
Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.
Bierce, Ambrose
Childhood
Consult. To seek another s approval of a course already decided on.
Bierce, Ambrose
Advice
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.
Bierce, Ambrose
Alliances
Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.
Bierce, Ambrose
Ambition
When in Rome, do as Rome does.
Bierce, Ambrose
Cities and City Life
Beauty. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
Bierce, Ambrose
Beauty
Divorce. A resumption of diplomatic relations and rectification of boundaries.
Bierce, Ambrose
Divorce
Admiral. That part of a warship which does the talking while the figurehead does the thinking.
Bierce, Ambrose
Army and Navy
Age. That period of life in which we compound for the vices that remain by reviling those we have no longer the vigor to commit.
Bierce, Ambrose
Age and Aging
Genealogy. An account of one s descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own.
Bierce, Ambrose
Ancestry
Acquaintance: a degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous.
Bierce, Ambrose
Acquaintance
Conservative. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
Bierce, Ambrose
Conservatives
Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.
Bierce, Ambrose
Architecture
Abscond. To move in a mysterious way, commonly with the property of another.
Bierce, Ambrose
Crime and Criminals
Enthusiasm. A distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.
Bierce, Ambrose
Enthusiasm
Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
Bierce, Ambrose
Anger
Confidante. One entrusted by A with the secrets of B confided to herself by C.
Bierce, Ambrose
Gossip
Irreligion. The principal one of the great faiths of the world.
Bierce, Ambrose
Atheism
A funeral is a pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker.
Bierce, Ambrose
Funerals
Acquaintance. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Bierce, Ambrose
Acquaintance
Abstainer. A weak man who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
Bierce, Ambrose
Abstinence
An acquaintance is someone we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Bierce, Ambrose
Acquaintance
Absurdity. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one s own opinion.
Bierce, Ambrose
Absurdity
Bigot, one who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.
Bierce, Ambrose
Bigotry
Woman absent is woman dead.
Bierce, Ambrose
Absence
Bride. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
Bierce, Ambrose
Weddings
Wit. The salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.
Bierce, Ambrose
Wit
They say that hens do cackle loudest when there is nothing vital in the eggs they have laid.
Bierce, Ambrose
Vanity