Ambrose Bierce Quotes - Page 2

TELEPHONE n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.
Ambrose Bierce
A popular author is one who writes what the people think. Genius invites them to think something else.
Ambrose Bierce
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.
Ambrose Bierce
In the presence of death reason and philosophy are silent
Ambrose Bierce
In this world one must have a name; it prevents confusion, even when it does not establish identity. Some, though, are known by numbers, which also seem inadequate distinctions.
Ambrose Bierce
The hardest tumble a man can take is to fall over his own bluff.
Ambrose Bierce
Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are not as they ought to be.
Ambrose Bierce
Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
Ambrose Bierce
There, conspicuous in the light of the conflagration, lay the dead body of a woman—the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles—the work of a shell.The child moved his little hands, making wild, uncertain gestures. He uttered a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries—something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey—a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil. The child was a deaf mute.Then he stood motionless, with quivering lips, looking down upon the wreck.
Ambrose Bierce
So I say a name, even if self-bestowed, is better than a number. In the register of the potter's field I shall soon have both. What wealth!
Ambrose Bierce
Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live!
Ambrose Bierce
What did I fear, and why? — I, to whom the night had beena more familiar facethan that of man —I, in whom that element of hereditary superstition from which none of us is altogether free had given to solitude and darkness and silence only a more alluring interest and charm!
Ambrose Bierce
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")
Ambrose Bierce
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.
Ambrose Bierce
This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated memories, some of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread, others remote and strange, having the character of crimson dreams with interspaces blank and black -- witch-fires glowing still and red in a great desolation.
Ambrose Bierce
He thought he was walking along a dusty road that showed white in the gathering darkness of a summer night. Whence and whither it led, and why he traveled it, he did not know, though all seemed simple and natural, as is the way in dreams; for in the Land Beyond the Bed surprises cease from troubling and the judgment is at rest.
Ambrose Bierce
Deep sadness is an artist of powers that affects people in different ways. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, shocking all the emotions to a sharper life. To another, it comes as the blow of a crushing strike.
Ambrose Bierce
Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs.
Ambrose Bierce
Unacquainted with grief, I knew not how to appraise my bereavement; I could not rightly estimate the strength of the stroke.
Ambrose Bierce
His act was rather that of a harmless lunatic than an enemy. We were not so new to the country as not to know that the solitary life of many a plainsman had a tendency to develop eccentricities of conduct and character not always easily distinguishable from mental aberration. A man is like a tree: in a forest of his fellows he will grow as straight as his generic and individual nature permits; alone, in the open, he yields to the deforming stresses and tortions that environ him.
Ambrose Bierce
Christian, n.: one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.
Ambrose Bierce
Marriage, n.: The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
Ambrose Bierce
Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.
Ambrose Bierce
God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.
Ambrose Bierce
History – An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
Ambrose Bierce
God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.
Ambrose Bierce
History – An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
Ambrose Bierce
BELLADONNA, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
Ambrose Bierce
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.
Ambrose Bierce
GRAPESHOT, n. An argument which the future is preparing in answer to the demands of American Socialism.
Ambrose Bierce
POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
Ambrose Bierce
AMNESTY, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.
Ambrose Bierce
diplomacy, n.: The patriotic art of lying for one's country.
Ambrose Bierce
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
ARMOR, n. The kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith.
Ambrose Bierce
acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Ambrose Bierce
Fear has no brains it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated.
Ambrose Bierce
Man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably out to be. His chief occupation is the 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
Man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably out to be. His chief occupation is the 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
Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
Ambrose Bierce
Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.
Ambrose Bierce
OBSOLETE, adj. No longer used by the timid. Said chiefly of words. A word which some lexicographer has marked obsolete is ever thereafter an object of dread and loathing to the fool writer, but if it is a good word and has no exact modern equivalent equally good, it is good enough for the good writer. Indeed, a writer's attitude toward "obsolete" words is as true a measure of his literary ability as anything except the character of his work. A dictionary of obsolete and obsolescent words would not only be singularly rich in strong and sweet parts of speech; it would add large possessions to the vocabulary of every competent writer who might not happen to be a competent reader.
Ambrose Bierce
Beware of the compound adjective, beloved of the tyro and the 'poetess'.
Ambrose Bierce
The exhilaration of battle was agreeable to him, but the sight of the dead, with their clay faces, blank eyes, and stiff bodies, which, when not unnaturally shrunken, were unnaturally swollen, had always intolerably affected him. He felt toward them a kind of reasonless antipathy which was something more than the physical and spiritual repugnance common to us all. Doubtless this feeling was due to his unusually acute sensibilities - his keen sense of the beautiful, which these hideous things outraged. Whatever may have been the cause, he could not look upon a dead body without a loathing which had in it an element of reselltment. What others have respected as the dignity of death had to him no existence - was altogether unthinkable. Death was a thing to be hated. It was not picturesque, it had no tender and solemn side - a dismal thing, hideous in all its manifestations and suggestions. Lieutenant Byring was a braver man than anybody knew, for nobody knew his horror of that which he was ever ready to encounter. ("A Tough Tussle")
Ambrose Bierce
EMBALM, v.i. To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew. The modern metallic burial casket is a step in the same direction, and many a dead man who ought now to be ornamenting his neighbour's lawn as a tree, or enriching his table as a bunch of radishes, is doomed to a long inutility. We shall get him after awhile if we are spared, but in the meantime, the violet and rose are languishing for a nibble at his gluteus maximus.
Ambrose Bierce
NIHILIST, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi.
Ambrose Bierce
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.
Ambrose Bierce
HOMICIDE, n. The slaying of one human being by another. There arefour kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, andpraiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slainwhether he fell by one kind or another -- the classification is foradvantage of the lawyers.
Ambrose Bierce
Selfish, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.
Ambrose Bierce
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.
Ambrose Bierce
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.
Ambrose Bierce
The covers of this book are too far apart.
Ambrose Bierce
Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
Ambrose Bierce
You don't have to be stupid to be a Christian, ... but it probably helps.
Ambrose Bierce
Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.
Ambrose Bierce
Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Ambrose Bierce