Ambrose Bierce Quotes

American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist (1842–1914)

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Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (June 24, 1842 – date of death uncertain; probably late 1912 or early 1914) was an 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.

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Pen Names: Dod Grile • William Herman

Birth Name: Ambrose Gwinnetter Bierice

Alternative Names: Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce

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Lawyer – One skilled in the circumvention of the law.

I will not submit unheard. There may be powers that are not malignant travelling this accursed road. I shall leave them a record and an appeal.

Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.

Zeus, n. The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog. Some explorers who have touched upon the shores of America, and one who professes to have penetrated a considerable distance to the interior, have thought that these four names stand for as many distinct deities, but in his monumental work on Surviving Faiths, Frumpp insists that the natives are monotheists, each having no other god than himself, whom he worships under many sacred names.

This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated memories, some of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread, others remote and strange, having the character of crimson dreams with interspaces blank and black — witch-fires glowing still and red in a great desolation.

Alone, adj. In bad company.

I was born to poor because of honest parents.

My travels in New Jersey having made me proof against surprise,

HOMICIDE, n. The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homocide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another — the classification is for advantage of the lawyers.

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

Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.

Conversation: A fair for the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement of his own wares to observe those of his neighbor.

BOUNDARY, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other.

Labor, n. One of the processes by which A acquires property of B.

Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.