Quotes By Ambrose Bierce

Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

Duty - that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.

Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.

An egotist is a person of low taste - more interested in himself than in me.

Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.

Dog - a kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship.

A man is known by the company he organizes.

Consult: To seek approval for a course of action already decided upon.

Curiosity, n. An objectionable quality of the female mind. The desire to know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul.

When you doubt, abstain.

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

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

Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.

Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

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.

Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Acquaintance. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.

The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.

Deliberation, n.: The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.

Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.

Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.

Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.

Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is - it is her shadow.

Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.

The covers of this book are too far apart.

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.

Famous, adj.: Conspicuously miserable.

Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.