Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce American satirist, critic, short story writer, editor and journalist. He is perhaps most famous for his serialized mock lexicon, The Devil's Dictionary, in which, over the years, he scathed American culture and accepted wisdom by pointing out alternate, more practical definitions for common words.

Found 380 thoughts of Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce

A miracle is an act or event out of the order of nature and unaccountable, as beating a normal hand of four kings and an ace with four aces and a king.

The world has suffered more from the ravages of ill-advised marriages than from virginity.

Romance is the fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of things as they are. In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to probability, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination.

Incompatibility: In matrimony, a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination.

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

Praying is to ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Love is a temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder.

Acquaintance is a degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor and obscure, and intimate when he is rich and famous.

The spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man.

Advice is the smallest current coin.

Valor is a soldierly compound of vanity, duty and the gambler's hope.

The future is that period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true, and our happiness is assured.

A cat is a soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.

Mad, adj: Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.

A bride is a woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.

Optimism: The doctrine that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong. ... It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious.

Congratulations is the civility of envy.

While your friend holds you affectionately by both your hands, you are safe, for you can watch both his.

Success is the one unpardonable sin against one's fellows.

Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.

History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

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

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

There are 4 kinds of Homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.