Ambrose Bierce Quotes

CANNON, n. An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.

Laughter — an interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features, and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious, and though intermittent, incurable.

SOUL, n. A spiritual entity concerning which there hath been brave disputation. Plato held that those souls which in a previous state of existence (antedating Athens) had obtained the clearest glimpses of eternal truth entered into the bodies of persons who became philosophers. Plato himself was a philosopher. The souls that had least contemplated divine truth animated the bodies of usurpers and despots.

We know no more than the ancients; we only know other things, but nothing in which is an assurance of perpetuity, and little that is truly wisdom.

OPPOSITION, n. In politics the party that prevents the Government from running amuck by hamstringing it.

Liberty, n. The distinction between freedom and liberty is not accurately known; naturalists have never been able to find a living specimen of either.

DIPLOMACY, n. The patriotic art of lying for one's country.

HABIT, n. A shackle for the free.

BEAUTY, n. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.

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

The devil had not only acquired a monopoly of the good music and the good fun, but has of late acquired a controlling interest in the good writing.

A popular author is one who writes what the people think. Genius invites them to think something else.

NOVEL, n. A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the panorama. Unity, totality of effect, is impossible; for besides the few pages last read all that is carried in mind is the mere plot of what has gone before. To the romance the novel is what photography is to painting. Its distinguishing principle, probability, corresponds to the literal actuality of the photograph and puts it distinctly into the category of reporting; whereas the free wing of the romancer enables him to mount to such altitudes of imagination as he may be fitted to attain; and the first three essentials of the literary art are imagination, imagination and imagination. The art of writing novels, such as it was, is long dead everywhere except in Russia, where it is new. Peace to its ashes — some of which have a large sale.

They were obviously headstones of graves, though the graves themselves no longer existed as either mounds or depressions; the years had leveled all. Scattered here and there, more massive blocks showed where some pompous or ambitious monument had once flung its feeble defiance at oblivion.

Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.