Quotes by Ambrose Bierce
Coward: One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.
Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Egotism, n: Doing the New York Times crossword puzzle with a pen.
Battle, n., A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.
Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.
Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
Politeness, n: The most acceptable hypocrisy.
Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
Education, n.: That which discloses the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.
Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.
Famous, adj.: Conspicuously miserable.
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum - I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.
Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue.
Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
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.
Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.
Mammon, n.: The god of the world's leading religion.
Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.
Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
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.
