Acquaintance: a degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous.
—Ambrose Bierce
Incompatibility: In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Marriage
Architect: One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Architecture, Science
Work: a dangerous disorder affecting high public functionaries who want to go fishing.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Disorder, Work
Backbite: To “speak of a man as you find him” when he can’t find you.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Insults, Slander
Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Thinking
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
Egotism, n: Doing the New York Times crossword puzzle with a pen.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Ego
DIPLOMACY, n. Lying in state, or the patriotic art of lying for one’s country.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Diplomacy
Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Time
Opiate. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Drugs
Insurance: An ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.
—Ambrose Bierce
Lawyer, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Lawyers
Truth: An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Truth
When in Rome, do as Rome does.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: City Life, Cities
Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Art
Creditor. One of a tribe of savages dwelling beyond the Financial Straits and dreaded for their desolating incursions.
—Ambrose Bierce
An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: One liners, Harmony
Saint, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Saints, Perspective
Patience is a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Patience
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Part of The Whole, Knowledge
Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Self-Control, Anger, Regret
Hope: desire and expectation rolled into one.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Hope
Appeal: In law, to put the dice into the box for another throw.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Justice, Trials, Law
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.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Community, Politics
Historian. A broad—gauge gossip.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Historians, History
Enthusiasm. A distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Enthusiasm
In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale. Diversity of character is due to their unequal activity.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Integrity
A man is known by the company he organizes.
—Ambrose Bierce
Topics: Management
Erudition: Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
—Ambrose Bierce
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Heywood Broun American Journalist
- Arthur Brisbane American Editor
- Shana Alexander American Journalist
- Nathaniel Parker Willis American Poet, Playwright
- Brenda Ueland American Journalist Memoirist
- William Allen White American Journalist
- Marilyn Ferguson American Author
- George Horace Lorimer American Magazine Editor
- E. L. Doctorow American Novelist
- George Jean Nathan American Critic, Editor
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