Ambrose Bierce Quotes, Reality Quotes, Connections Quotes

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

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DIAGNOSIS, n. A physician's forecast of disease by the patient's pulse and purse.

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DIARY, n. A daily record of that part of one's life, which he can relate to himself without blushing.

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Rome has seven sacraments, but the Protestant churches, being less prosperous, feel that they can afford only two, and these of inferior sanctity.

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Appeal. In law, to put the dice into the box for another throw.

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LIFE, n. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay. We live in daily apprehension of its loss; yet when lost it is not missed.

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LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

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POETRY, n. A form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the Magazines.

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Income is the natural and rational gauge and measure of respectability.

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RADIUM, n. A mineral that gives off heat and stimulates the organ that a scientist is a fool with.

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True, more than a half of the green graves in the Grafton cemetery are marked "Unknown," and sometimes it occurs that one thinks of the contradiction involved in "honoring the memory" of him of whom no memory remains to honor; but the attempt seems to do no great harm to the living, even to the logical.

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Tags : Ambrose Bierce Quotes , Memories Quotes , Thinking Quotes

The bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense has no following and is tartly reminded that 'it isn't in the dictionary' - although down to the time of the first lexicographer no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary.

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Tags : Ambrose Bierce Quotes , Innovation Quotes , Lexicographer Quotes

RUBBISH, n. Worthless matter, such as the religions, philosophies, literatures, arts and sciences of the tribes infesting the regions lying due south from Boreaplas.

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NOVEL, n. A short story padded.

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A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links.

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Tags : Ambrose Bierce Quotes , Fall Quotes , Men Quotes

INTERPRETER, n. One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.

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If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it.

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Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;" as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.

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I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London.

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Ability is commonly found to consist mainly in a high degree of solemnity.

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