Ambrose Bierce

• Absurdity — a statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion.
• Gunpowder — an agency employed by civilized nations for the settlement of disputes which might become troublesome if left unadjusted.
• Defenceless — unable to attack.
• Marriage — the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
• Once — enough.
• Opportunity — a favorable occasion for grasping a disappointment.
• Admiration — our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves.
• Year — a period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
• Twice — once too often.
• Bore — a person who talks when you wish him to listen.
• Egotist — a person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
• Dentist — a prestidigitator who, putting metal into your mouth, pulls coins out of your pocket.
• Idiot — a member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot’s activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but “pervades and regulates the whole.” He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.
• Apologize — to lay the foundation for a future offence.
• Clarionet — an instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments that are worse than a clarionet — two clarionets.
• Love — a temporary insanity curable by marriage.
• I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.
• Mouse — an animal which strews its path with fainting women.
• Brain — an apparatus with which we think what we think.
• Pray — to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
• Optimist — a proponent of the doctrine that black is white.
• Connoisseur — a specialist who knows everything about something and nothing about anything else.
• Acquaintance — a person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
• Dawn — the time when men of reason go to bed.
• Liberty — one of Imagination’s most precious possessions.
• Advice — the smallest current coin.
• Neighbor — one whom we are commanded to love as ourselves, and who does all he knows how to make us disobedient.
• Politeness — the most acceptable hypocrisy.
• Philosophy — a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
• Happiness — an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
• Clairvoyant — a person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron, namely, that he is a blockhead.

last edited: 2026-08-25 13:30