111 Quotes By Ambrose Bierce


Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.
Ambrose Bierce on experience

Enthusiasm - a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.
Ambrose Bierce on experience

A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms agains himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.
Ambrose Bierce on failure

Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.
Ambrose Bierce on failure

Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Ambrose Bierce on faith

Famous, adj.: Conspicuously miserable.
Ambrose Bierce on famous

Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Ambrose Bierce on fear

Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
Ambrose Bierce on future

To apologize is to lay the foundation for a future offense.
Ambrose Bierce on future

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
Ambrose Bierce on god

Sabbath - a weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.
Ambrose Bierce on god

Forgetfulness - a gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.
Ambrose Bierce on god

Edible - good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
Ambrose Bierce on good

Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
Ambrose Bierce on good

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.
Ambrose Bierce on good

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
Ambrose Bierce on government

Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.
Ambrose Bierce on great

Irreligion - the principal one of the great faiths of the world.
Ambrose Bierce on great

Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
Ambrose Bierce on happiness

Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
Ambrose Bierce on happiness