Famous Quotes

Quotes by Ambrose Bierce

• A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms agains himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.
• Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.
• 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.
• Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.
• Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.
• Ardor, n. The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.
• Beauty, n: the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
• Bride: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
• 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.
• 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.
• Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.
• 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.
• Convent - a place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness.
• Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
• Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.
• Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.
• Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.
• Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.
• Doubt, indulged and cherished, is in danger of becoming denial but if honest, and bent on thorough investigation, it may soon lead to full establishment of the truth.
• 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.
• Edible, adj.: 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.
• Education, n.: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
• Eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.
• Enthusiasm - a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.
• Eulogy. Praise of a person who has either the advantages of wealth and power, or the consideration to be dead.
• Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
• Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.
• Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
• Famous, adj.: Conspicuously miserable.
• Forgetfulness - a gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.
• Friendless. Having no favors to bestow. Destitute of fortune. Addicted to utterance of truth and common sense.
• Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
• Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
• History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
• 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.
• Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.
• Irreligion - the principal one of the great faiths of the world.
• It is evident that skepticism, while it makes no actual change in man, always makes him feel better.
• Jealous, adj. Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.
• Land: A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure.
• Lawsuit: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.
• Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.