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NOBLEMAN, n. Nature's provision for wealthy American minds ambitious to incur social distinction and suffer high life.
Ambrose Bierce
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Ambrose Bierce
Born: 1842
Born: June 24
Aphorist
Journalist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Meigs County
Ohio
Dod Grile
William Herman
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce
Ambrose Bierce
Suffering
Incur
American
Provision
Social
Ambitious
Nature
Wealthy
Mind
Distinction
Life
Suffer
Minds
Nobleman
High
Noblemen
More quotes by Ambrose Bierce
PAST, n. That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance... The Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one - the knowledge and the dream.
Ambrose Bierce
RAREBIT n. A Welsh rabbit, in the speech of the humorless, who point out that it is not a rabbit. To whom it may be solemnly explained that the comestible known as toad-in-a-hole is really not a toad, and that riz-de-veau à la financière is not the smile of a calf prepared after the recipe of a she banker.
Ambrose Bierce
REPUBLIC, n. A nation in which, the thing governing and the thing governed being the same, there is only a permitted authority to enforce an optional obedience.
Ambrose Bierce
Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
Ambrose Bierce
Jealous, adj. Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.
Ambrose Bierce
The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.
Ambrose Bierce
Snow pursued by the wind is not wholly unlike a retreating army. In the open field it ranges itself in ranks and battalions where it can get a foothold it makes a stand where it can take cover it does so. You may see whole platoons of snow cowering behind a bit of broken wall.
Ambrose Bierce
UXORIOUSNESS, n. A perverted affection that has strayed to one's own wife.
Ambrose Bierce
Duty - that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
Ambrose Bierce
MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.
Ambrose Bierce
Fidelity - a virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.
Ambrose Bierce
Clairvoyant, n.: A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron - namely, that he is a blockhead.
Ambrose Bierce
Truth is more deceptive than falsehood, for it is more frequently presented by those from whom we do not expect it, and so has against it a numerical presumption.
Ambrose Bierce
Pantheism, n. The doctrine that everything is God, in contradistinction to the doctrine that God is everything.
Ambrose Bierce
HEART, n. Figuratively, this useful organ is said to be the seat of emotions and sentiments . . . . It is now known that sentiments and emotions reside in the stomach, being evolved from food by chemical action of the gastric fluid.
Ambrose Bierce
Litigation: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.
Ambrose Bierce
Birth: The first and direst of all disasters.
Ambrose Bierce
Hope is an explorer who surveys the country ahead. That is why we know so much about the Hereafter and so little about the Heretofore.
Ambrose Bierce
READING, n. The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in dialect and humor in slang.
Ambrose Bierce
PRESIDE, v. To guide the action of a deliberative body to a desirable result. In Journalese, to perform upon a musical instrument as, He presided at the piccolo.
Ambrose Bierce
