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QUIXOTIC, adj. Absurdly chivalric, like Don Quixote. An insight into the beauty and excellence of this incomparable adjective is unhappily denied to him who has the misfortune to know that the gentleman's name is pronounced Ke-ho-tay.

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
Gentleman
Absurdly
Excellence
Adjective
Insight
Pronounced
Name
Incomparable
Beauty
Adjectives
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Misfortune
Quixotic
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Quixote
Denied
Unhappily

More quotes by Ambrose Bierce

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PITIFUL, adj. The state of an enemy or opponent after an imaginary encounter with oneself.
Ambrose Bierce
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MUSTANG, n. An indocile horse of the western plains. In English society, the American wife of an English nobleman.
Ambrose Bierce
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Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.
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Damning, with bell, book and candle / Some sinner whose opinions are a scandal. / A rite permitting Satan to enslave him / Forever, and forbidding Christ to save him.
Ambrose Bierce
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MISERICORDE, n. A dagger which in mediaeval warfare was used by the foot soldier to remind an unhorsed knight that he was mortal.
Ambrose Bierce
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EVANGELIST, n. A bearer of good tidings, particularly (in a religious sense) such as assure us of our own salvation and the damnation of our neighbors.
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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
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TEETOTALER, n. One who abstains from strong drink, sometimes totally, sometimes tolerably totally.
Ambrose Bierce
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SATIETY, n. The feeling that one has for the plate after he has eaten its contents, madam.
Ambrose Bierce
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A nation that will not enforce its laws has no claim to the respect and allegiance of its people.
Ambrose Bierce
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RADICALISM, n. The conservatism of to-morrow injected into the affairs of to-day.
Ambrose Bierce
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OBLIVION, n. The state or condition in which the wicked cease from struggling and the dreary are at rest. Fame's eternal dumping ground.
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Dance, v.i. To leap about to the sound of tittering music, preferably with arms about your neighbor's wife or daughter. There are many kinds of dances, but all those requiring the participation of the two sexes have two characteristics in common: they are conspicuously innocent, and warmly loved by the vicious.
Ambrose Bierce
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The ghost is the outward and visible signs of an inward fear.
Ambrose Bierce
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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
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Liar: A lawyer with a roving commission.
Ambrose Bierce
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A subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship . . . . [H]is master works for the means wherewith to purchase the idle wag of the Solomonic tail, seasoned with a look of tolerant recognition.
Ambrose Bierce
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Aristocrats: n. fellows that wear downy hats and clean shirts - guilty of education and suspected of bank accounts.
Ambrose Bierce
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Pantheism, n. The doctrine that everything is God, in contradistinction to the doctrine that God is everything.
Ambrose Bierce
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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