Optimism: The doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Optimism, Virtues
Embalm, v.: 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 neighbor’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 the rose are languishing for a nibble at his glutaeus maximus.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Death
When prosperous the fool trembles for the evil that is to come; in adversity the philosopher smiles for the good that he has had.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Gratitude
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.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Age, Aging
Advice: The suggestions you give someone else which you hope will work for your benefit.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Advice
Reconsider, v. To seek a justification for a decision already made.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Decisions, Decision
A cynic is a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, and not as they ought to be.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Cynicism
Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Voting
Work: a dangerous disorder affecting high public functionaries who want to go fishing.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Disorder, Work
Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Impartiality
Woman absent is woman dead.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Absence
Pray. To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Prayer
Calamity, n. A more than commonly plain and unmistakable reminder that the affairs of this life are not of our own ordering.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Adversity
Education is that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Education
Commerce, n. A kind of transaction in which A plunders from B the goods of C, and for compensation B picks the pocket of D of money belonging to E.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Business
Duty. That which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Duty
Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Mothers
Aristocrats: Fellows that wear downy hats and clean shirts-guilty of education and suspected of bank accounts.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Class
Don’t steal; thou it never thus compete successfully in business. Cheat.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Business
An old wine-bibber having been smashed in a railway collision, some wine was poured on his lips to revive him. “Pauillac, 1873,” he murmured and died.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Wine
Hope: desire and expectation rolled into one.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Hope
Academy: A modern school where football is taught.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Sports, Football
Litigant. A person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bones.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Justice
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.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Compromise
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.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Food, Perspective, Eating
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Opinions, Defects
Backbite: To “speak of a man as you find him” when he can’t find you.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Insults, Slander
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Just for Fun, Philosophy, Science, Philosophers
Laziness. Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Laziness
The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Honesty
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
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- Brenda Ueland American Journalist Memoirist
- William Allen White American Journalist
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- George Horace Lorimer American Magazine Editor
- E. L. Doctorow American Novelist
- George Jean Nathan American Critic, Editor
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