Top 500 Ambrose Bierce Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “WALL STREET, n. A symbol for sin for every devil to rebuke. That Wall Street is a den of thieves is a belief that serves every unsuccessful thief in place of a hope in Heaven.”

— Ambrose Bierce

252. “Women and foxes, being weak, are distinguished by superior tact.”

— Ambrose Bierce

253. “Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.”

— Ambrose Bierce

254. “Contempt; the feeling of a prudent man for an enemy who is too formidable safely to be opposed.”

— Ambrose Bierce

255. “POVERTY, n. A file provided for the teeth of the rats of reform. Its victims are distinguished by possession of all the virtues and by their faith in leaders seeking to conduct them into a prosperity where they believe these to be unknown.”

— Ambrose Bierce

256. “Fashion, n. A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey.”

— Ambrose Bierce

257. “KILT, n. A costume sometimes worn by Scotchmen in America and Americans in Scotland.”

— Ambrose Bierce

258. “Birth: The first and direst of all disasters.”

— Ambrose Bierce

259. “INK, n. A villainous compound of tannogallate of iron, gum-arabic, and water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote intellectual crime.”

— Ambrose Bierce

260. “No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theater of war.”

— Ambrose Bierce

261. “They say that hens do cackle loudest when there is nothing vital in the eggs they have laid.”

— Ambrose Bierce

262. “UXORIOUSNESS, n. A perverted affection that has strayed to one’s own wife.”

— Ambrose Bierce

263. “Youth looks forward, for nothing is behind! Age backward, for nothing is before.”

— Ambrose Bierce

264. “DAY, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent. This period is divided into two parts, the day proper and the night, or day improper – the former devoted to sins of business, the latter consecrated to the other sort.”

— Ambrose Bierce

265. “To apologize is to lay the foundation for a future offense.”

— Ambrose Bierce

266. “Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.”

— Ambrose Bierce

267. “Abscond – to move in a mysterious way, commonly with the property of another.”

— Ambrose Bierce

268. “Cribbage, n. A substitute for conversation among those to whom nature has denied ideas.”

— Ambrose Bierce

269. “RECREATION, n. A particular kind of dejection to relieve a general fatigue.”

— Ambrose Bierce

270. “The circus a place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool.”

— Ambrose Bierce

271. “TRICHINOSIS, n. The pig’s reply to proponents of porcophagy.”

— Ambrose Bierce

272. “INGRATE, n. One who receives a benefit from another, or is otherwise an object of charity.”

— Ambrose Bierce

273. “Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves.”

— Ambrose Bierce

274. “MANNA, n. A food miraculously given to the Israelites in the wilderness. When it was no longer supplied to them they settled down and tilled the soil, fertilizing it, as a rule, with the bodies of the original occupants.”

— Ambrose Bierce

275. “That part of your friend which it is your privilege to contemplate in your adversity.”

— Ambrose Bierce

276. “Cat: a soft indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.”

— Ambrose Bierce

277. “Prejudice – a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.”

— Ambrose Bierce

278. “GRAVE, n. A place in which the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student.”

— Ambrose Bierce

279. “Coward: One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.”

— Ambrose Bierce

280. “A miracle is an act or event out of the order of nature and unaccountable, as beating a normal hand of four kings and an ace with four aces and a king.”

— Ambrose Bierce

281. “Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.”

— Ambrose Bierce

282. “TELESCOPE, n. A device having a relation to the eye similar to that of the telephone to the ear, enabling distant objects to plague us with a multitude of needless details. Luckily it is unprovided with a bell summoning us to the sacrifice.”

— Ambrose Bierce

283. “Riven and torn with cannon-shot, the trunks of the trees protruded bunches of splinters like hands, the fingers above the wound interlacing with those below.”

— Ambrose Bierce

284. “Women of genius commonly have masculine faces, figures and manners. In transplanting brains to an alien soil God leaves a little of the original earth clinging to the roots.”

— Ambrose Bierce

285. “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 pa.”

— Ambrose Bierce

286. “CLOCK, n. A machine of great moral value to man, allaying his concern for the future by reminding him what a lot of time remains to him.”

— Ambrose Bierce

287. “MAMMON, n. The god of the world’s leading religion. The chief temple is in the holy city of New York.”

— Ambrose Bierce

288. “BAIT, n. A preparation that renders the hook more palatable. The best kind is beauty.”

— Ambrose Bierce

289. “RICH, adj. Holding in trust and subject to an accounting the property of the indolent, the incompetent, the unthrifty, the envious and the luckless.”

— Ambrose Bierce

290. “Advice, the smallest current coin.”

— Ambrose Bierce

291. “MONKEY, n. An arboreal animal which makes itself at home in genealogical trees.”

— Ambrose Bierce

292. “April fool, n. The March fool with another month added to his folly.”

— Ambrose Bierce

293. “Aborigines, n.: Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.”

— Ambrose Bierce

294. “Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.”

— Ambrose Bierce

295. “Distance, n. The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs and keep.”

— Ambrose Bierce

296. “To be positive is to be mistaken at the top of one’s voice.”

— Ambrose Bierce

297. “In the presence of death reason and philosophy are silent.”

— Ambrose Bierce

298. “We must stop chasing dollars, stop lying, stop cheating, stop ignoring art, literature, and all the refining agencies and instrumentalities of civilization.”

— Ambrose Bierce

299. “Divorce: a resumption of diplomatic relations and rectification of boundaries.”

— Ambrose Bierce

300. “IMMORAL, adj. Inexpedient. Whatever in the long run and with regard to the greater number of instances men find to be generally inexpedient comes to be considered wrong, wicked, immoral.”

— Ambrose Bierce