Top 500 Ambrose Bierce Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Birth: The first and direst of all disasters.”

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

253. “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

254. “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

255. “PHYSIOGNOMY, n. The art of determining the character of another by the resemblances and differences between his face and our own, which is the standard of excellence.”

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

257. “Coronation: The ceremony of investing a sovereign with the outward and visible signs of his divine right to be blown skyhigh with a dynamite bomb.”

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

261. “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

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Ambrose Bierce

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

282. “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

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

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

— Ambrose Bierce

287. “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

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

290. “ORTHOGRAPHY, n. The science of spelling by the eye instead of the ear.”

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

292. “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

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

295. “An Italian proverb says: “The furrier gets the skins of more foxes than asses.”

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

297. “Advice, the smallest current coin.”

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Ambrose Bierce

300. “Fork: An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth.”

— Ambrose Bierce