Ambrose Bierce Quotes

Connoisseur, n. A specialist who knows everything about something and nothing about anything else.

Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane.

Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.

BALLOON, n. A contrivance for larding the earth with the fat of fools.

AMATEUR, n. A public nuisance who mistakes taste for skill, and confounds his ambition with his ability.

Observatory
n, A place where astronomers conjecture away
the guesses of their predecessors.

LOGOMACHY, n. A war in which the weapons are words and the wounds punctures in the swim-bladder of self-esteem — a kind of contest in which, the vanquished being unconscious of defeat, the victor is denied the reward of success.

He wrote with terrible rapidity, the twig in his fingers rilling blood without renewal; but in the middle of a sentence his hands denied their service to his will, his arms fell to his sides, the book to the earth; and powerless to move or cry out, he found himself staring into the sharply drawn face and blank, dead eyes of his own mother, standing white and silent in the garments of the grave!

PORTUGUESE, n.pl. A species of geese indigenous to Portugal. They are mostly without feathers and imperfectly edible, even when stuffed with garlic.

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.

KORAN, n. A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.

BACCHUS, n. A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.

Coward: one who, in perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.

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.

LOQUACITY, n. A disorder which renders the sufferer unable to curb his tongue when you wish to talk.