Bierce Quotes

Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

The covers of this book are too far apart.

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

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

Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.

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

Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.

Selfish, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.

Ocean, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man — who has no gills.

Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.

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

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

Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

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

Apologize: To lay the foundation for a future offence.

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

Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see and feel.

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.

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;" as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.

Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.

The most affectionate creature in the world is a wet dog.

You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute.

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

Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.

You don't have to be stupid to be a Christian, ... but it probably helps.

Redemption, n. Deliverance of sinners from the penalty of their sin through their murder of the deity against whom they sinned. The doctrine of Redemption is the fundamental mystery of our holy religions, and whoso believeth in it shall not perish, but have everlasting life in which to try to understand it.

FIDELITY, n. A virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.

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

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

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

HOMICIDE, n. The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another -- the classification is for advantage of the lawyers.

Christian, n.: one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.

VOTE, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

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

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

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

BELLADONNA, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.

Lawyer – One skilled in the circumvention of the law.

Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.

Hash, x. There is no definition for this word - nobody knows what hash is. Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable. Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

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

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.

There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.” ~ Ambrose Bierce

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

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

Infidel, n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.

Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.

Prejudice is a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.

Impiety, n. Your irreverence toward my deity.

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

AMNESTY, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.

Self-evident, adj. Evident to one's self and to nobody else.

NIHILIST, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi.

Twice – Once too often.

Friendship: A ship big enough for two in fair weather, but only one in foul.

ARMOR, n. The kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith.

Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.

DISOBEDIENCE, n. The silver lining to the cloud of servitude.

Christian - One who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

Peace: A period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

Optimist – A proponent of the doctrine that black is white.

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.

Birth, n.: The first and direst of all disasters.

Bride, n. - A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.

Cabbage: A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head.

TRUTHFUL, adj. Dumb and illiterate.

SAINT, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.

ABSTAINER, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.

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

Good-bye -- if you hear of my being stood up against a stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease or falling down the cellar stairs.

Peace in international affairs: a period of cheating between periods of fighting

Clarinet n. An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments worse than a clarinet – two clarinets.

Think twice before you speak to a friend in need

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.

Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. 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 it is the first.

Fear has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated.

I was born to poor because of honest parents.

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

acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.

DOG: A kind of additional or subsidiary Diety designed to catch the overflow or surplus of the world's worship.

Laughter--an interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features, and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious, and though intermittent, incurable.

Opportunity: A favorable occasion for grasping a disappointment.

POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

diplomacy, n.: The patriotic art of lying for one's country.

Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.

Immortality: A toy which people cry for, And on their knees apply for, Dispute, contend and lie for, And if allowed Would be right proud Eternally to die for.

LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

Be as decent as you can. Don't believe without evidence. Treat things divine with marked respect — don't have anything to do with them. Do not trust humanity without collateral security; it will play you some scurvy trick. Remember that it hurts no one to be treated as an enemy entitled to respect until he shall prove himself a friend worthy of affection. Cultivate a taste for distasteful truths. And, finally, most important of all, endeavor to see things as they are, not as they ought to be.

Cribbage, n. A substitute for conversation among those to whom nature has denied ideas.

Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion - thus: Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man. Minor Premise: One man can dig a post-hole in sixty seconds; Therefore- Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a post-hole in one second. This may be called syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed.

Idiot - A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.

Hippogriff, n. An animal (now extinct) which was half horse and half griffin. The griffin was itself a compound creature, half lion and half eagle. The hippogriff was actually, therefore, only one-quarter eagle, which is two dollars and fifty cents in gold. The study of zoology is full of surprises.

ABNORMAL, adj. Not conforming to standards in matters of thought and conduct. To be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested. A striving toward the straiter [sic] resemblance of the Average Man than he hath to himself, whoso attaineth thereto shall have peace, the prospect of death and the hope of Hell.

I once expected to spend seven years walking around the world on foot. I walked from Mexico to Panama where the road ended before an almost uninhabited swamp called the Choco Colombiano. Even today there is no road. Perhaps it is time for me to resume my wanderings where I left off as a tropical tramp in the slums of Panama. Perhaps like Ambrose Bierce who disappeared in the desert of Sonora I may also disappear. But after being in all mankind it is hard to come to terms with oblivion - not to see hundreds of millions of Chinese with college diplomas come aboard the locomotive of history - not to know if someone has solved the riddle of the universe that baffled Einstein in his futile efforts to make space, time, gravitation and electromagnetism fall into place in a unified field theory - never to experience democracy replacing plutocracy in the military-industrial complex that rules America - never to witness the day foreseen by Tennyson 'when the war-drums no longer and the battle-flags are furled, in the parliament of man, the federation of the world.' I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions - just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre-Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little rag and bone shop of the heart whose motto is 'Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.' I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey around the world." [Shakespeare & Company, archived statement]

From the vast, invisible ocean of moonlight overhead fell, here and here, a slender, broken stream that seemed to plash against the intercepting branches and trickle to earth, forming small white pools among the clumps of laurel. But these leaks were few and served only to accentuate the blackness of his environment, which his imagination found it easy to people with all manner of unfamiliar shapes, menacing, uncanny, or merely grotesque. 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 footstep 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! ("A Tough Tussle")