Quotes By Ambrose Bierce

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

Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.

Childhood: 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.

Confidante: One entrusted by A with the secrets of B confided to herself by C.

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

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

Doubt begins only at the last frontiers of what is possible.

Lawsuit: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.

Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own.

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.

Duty - that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.

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

An egotist is a person of low taste - more interested in himself than in me.

Perseverance - a lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.

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

Dog - a kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship.

A man is known by the company he organizes.

Clairvoyant, n.: A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron - namely, that he is a blockhead.

Consult: To seek approval for a course of action already decided upon.

Curiosity, n. An objectionable quality of the female mind. The desire to know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul.

When you doubt, abstain.

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

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.

Acquaintance. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.

Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.

Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

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.

Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

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

Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.