Ambrose Bierce Quotes, Cheating Quotes, Understanding Quotes

ORATORY, n. A conspiracy between speech and action to cheat the understanding. A tyranny tempered by stenography.

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FLAG, n. A colored rag borne above troops and hoisted on forts and ships. It appears to serve the same purpose as certain signs that one sees and vacant lots in London

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BIRTH, n. The first and direst of all disasters. As to the nature of it there appears to be no uniformity. Castor and Pollux were born from the egg. Pallas came out of a skull. Galatea was once a block of stone. Peresilis, who wrote in the tenth century, avers that he grew up out of the ground where a priest had spilled holy water. It is known that Arimaxus was derived from a hole in the earth, made by a stroke of lightning. Leucomedon was the son of a cavern in Mount Etna, and I have myself seen a man come out of a wine cellar.

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BLANK-VERSE, n. Unrhymed iambic pentameters - the most difficult kind of English verse to write acceptably; a kind, therefore, much affected by those who cannot acceptably write any kind.

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A chop is a piece of leather skillfully attached to a bone and administered to the patients at restaurants.

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NEWTONIAN, Pertaining to a philosophy of the universe invented by Newton, who discovered that an apple will fall to the ground, but was unable to say why. His successors and disciples have advanced so far as to be able to say when.

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OYSTER, n. A slimy, gobby shellfish which civilization gives men the hardihood to eat without removing its entrails! The shells are sometimes given to the poor.

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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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Truth is so good a thing that falsehood can not afford to be without it.

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Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.

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If you would be accounted great by your contemporaries, be not too much greater than they.

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

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INTIMACY, n. A relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their mutual destruction.

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SATIRE, n. An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness.

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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.

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Present, n. That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.

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HUMORIST, n. A plague that would have softened down the hoar austerity of Pharaoh's heart and persuaded him to dismiss Israel with his best wishes, cat-quick.

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TAKE, v.t. To acquire, frequently by force but preferably by stealth.

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Pantheism, n. The doctrine that everything is God, in contradistinction to the doctrine that God is everything.

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International arbitration may be defined as the substitution of many burning questions for a smoldering one

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