Top 500 Ambrose Bierce Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “RITE, n. A religious or semi-religious ceremony fixed by law, precept or custom, with the essential oil of sincerity carefully squeezed out of it.”

— Ambrose Bierce

452. “TABLE D’HOTE, n. A caterer’s thrifty concession to the universal passion for irresponsibility.”

— Ambrose Bierce

453. “MISDEMEANOR, n. An infraction of the law having less dignity than a felony and constituting no claim to admittance into the best criminal society.”

— Ambrose Bierce

454. “SEINE, n. A kind of net for effecting an involuntary change of environment. For fish it is made strong and coarse, but women are more easily taken with a singularly delicate fabric weighted with small, cut stones.”

— Ambrose Bierce

455. “QUIXOTIC, adj. Absurdly chivalric, like Don Quixote. An insight into the beauty and excellence of this incomparable adjective is unhappily denied to him who has the misfortune to know that the gentleman’s name is pronounced Ke-ho-tay.”

— Ambrose Bierce

456. “CLERGYMAN, n. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of better his temporal ones.”

— Ambrose Bierce

457. “Turkey: A large bird whose flesh, when eaten on certain religious anniversaries has the peculiar property of attesting piety and gratitude.”

— Ambrose Bierce

458. “PERORATION, n. The explosion of an oratorical rocket. It dazzles, but to an observer having the wrong kind of nose its most conspicuous peculiarity is the smell of the several kinds of powder used in preparing it.”

— Ambrose Bierce

459. “True, man does not know woman. But neither does woman.”

— Ambrose Bierce

460. “A man is known by the company he organizes.”

— Ambrose Bierce

461. “Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue.”

— Ambrose Bierce

462. “RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the conscience.”

— Ambrose Bierce

463. “PRESIDENT, n. The leading figure in a small group of men of whom – and of whom only – it is positively known that immense numbers of their countrymen did not want any of them for President.”

— Ambrose Bierce

464. “MUGWUMP, n. In politics one afflicted with self-respect and addicted to the vice of independence. A term of contempt.”

— Ambrose Bierce

465. “Don’t steal; thou’lt never thus compete successfully in business. Cheat.”

— Ambrose Bierce

466. “He laughs best who laughs least.”

— Ambrose Bierce

467. “PROBOSCIS, n. The rudimentary organ of an elephant which serves him in place of the knife-and-fork that Evolution has as yet denied him. For purposes of humor it is popularly called a trunk.”

— Ambrose Bierce

468. “READING, n. The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in “dialect” and humor in slang.”

— Ambrose Bierce

469. “PREHISTORIC, adj. Belonging to an early period and a museum. Antedating the art and practice of perpetuating falsehood.”

— Ambrose Bierce

470. “DIGESTION, n. The conversion of victuals into virtues. When the process is imperfect, vices are evolved instead – a circumstance from which that wicked writer, Dr. Jeremiah Blenn, infers that the ladies are the greater sufferers from dyspepsia.”

— Ambrose Bierce

471. “Opportunity: A favorable occasion for grasping a disappointment.”

— Ambrose Bierce

472. “YANKEE, n. In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown.”

— Ambrose Bierce

473. “LIVER, n. A large red organ thoughtfully provided by nature to be bilious with. The liver is heaven’s best gift to the goose; without it that bird would be unable to supply us with the Strasbourg “pate”.”

— Ambrose Bierce

474. “In the algebra of psychology, X stands for a woman’s heart.”

— Ambrose Bierce

475. “Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.”

— Ambrose Bierce

476. “WOMAN, n. An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a rudimentary susceptibility to domestication.”

— Ambrose Bierce

477. “PRISON, n. A place of punishments and rewards. The poet assures us that – stone walls do not a prison make.”

— Ambrose Bierce

478. “OPIATE, n. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard.”

— Ambrose Bierce

479. “RATTLESNAKE, n. Our prostrate brother, “Homo ventrambulans”.”

— Ambrose Bierce

480. “RECONCILIATION, n. A suspension of hostilities. An armed truce for the purpose of digging up the dead.”

— Ambrose Bierce

481. “RIBALDRY, n. Censorious language by another concerning oneself.”

— Ambrose Bierce

482. “RACK, n. An argumentative implement formerly much used in persuading devotees of a false faith to embrace the living truth. As a call to the unconverted the rack never had any particular efficacy, and is now held in light popular esteem.”

— Ambrose Bierce

483. “Even the laws of justice themselves cannot subsist without mixture of injustice.”

— Ambrose Bierce

484. “Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs.”

— Ambrose Bierce

485. “Admiral. That part of a warship which does the talking while the figurehead does the thinking.”

— Ambrose Bierce

486. “FEMALE, n. One of the opposing, or unfair, sex.”

— Ambrose Bierce

487. “REPARTEE, n. Prudent insult in retort. Practiced by gentlemen with a constitutional aversion to violence, but a strong disposition to offend. In a war of words, the tactics of the North American Indian.”

— Ambrose Bierce

488. “Cannon: An instrument used in the rectification of national boundaries.”

— Ambrose Bierce

489. “Justice is a commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.”

— Ambrose Bierce

490. “Self-evident, adj. Evident to one’s self and to nobody else.”

— Ambrose Bierce

491. “Ambidextrous, adj.: Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left.”

— Ambrose Bierce

492. “In this world one must have a name; it prevents confusion, even when it does not establish identity. Some, though, are known by numbers, which also seem inadequate distinctions.”

— Ambrose Bierce

493. “KING, n. A male person commonly known in America as a “crowned head,” although he never wears a crown and has usually no head to speak of.”

— Ambrose Bierce

494. “Consul – in American politics, a person who having failed to secure an office from the people is given one by the Administration on condition that he leave the country.”

— Ambrose Bierce

495. “INFALAPSARIAN, n. One who ventures to believe that Adam need not have sinned unless he had a mind to – in opposition to the Supralapsarians, who hold that that luckless person’s fall was decreed from the beginning.”

— Ambrose Bierce

496. “FROG, n. A reptile with edible legs.”

— Ambrose Bierce

497. “Something that is supposed to typify or stand for something else. Many symbols are mere “survivals” – as funereal urns carved on memorial monuments. We cannot stop making them, but we can give them a name that conceals our helplessness.”

— Ambrose Bierce

498. “UNDERSTANDING, n. A cerebral secretion that enables one having it to know a house from a horse by the roof on the house. Its nature and laws have been exhaustively expounded by Locke, who rode a house, and Kant, who lived in a horse.”

— Ambrose Bierce

499. “Fear has no brains; it is an idiot.”

— Ambrose Bierce

500. “ORTHODOX, n. An ox wearing the popular religious joke.”

— Ambrose Bierce