Quote

STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue. The truth of the stories here following has, however, not been successfully impeached.

Ambrose Bierce

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Following
However
Story
Stories
Impeached
Truth
Untrue
Commonly
Successfully
Narrative

More quotes by Ambrose Bierce

Image
Habit: A shackle for the free.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
EXHORT, v.t. In religious affairs, to put the conscience of another upon the spit and roast it to a nut-brown discomfort.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Barometer, n.: An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
OPERA, n. A play representing life in another world, whose inhabitants have no speech but song, no motions but gestures and no postures but attitudes.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Enthusiasm - a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
OBSTINATE, adj. Inaccessible to the truth as it is manifest in the splendor and stress of our advocacy.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
ORATORY, n. A conspiracy between speech and action to cheat the understanding. A tyranny tempered by stenography.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
REVIEW, v.t. To set your wisdom (holding not a doubt of it./ Although in truth there's neither bone nor skin to it)/ At work upon a book, and so read out of it/ The qualities that you have first read into it.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
TZETZE (or TSETSE) FLY, n. An African insect (Glossina morsitans) whose bite is commonly regarded as nature's most efficacious remedy for insomnia, though some patients prefer that of the American novelist (Mendax interminabilis).
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Crowned with leaves of the laurel. In England the Poet Laureate is an officer of the sovereign's court, acting as dancing skeleton at every royal feast and singing-mute at every royal funeral.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
PERORATION, n. The explosion of an oratorical rocket. It dazzles, but to an observer having the wrong kind of nose its most conspicuous peculiarity is the smell of the several kinds of powder used in preparing it.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
PROBOSCIS, n. The rudimentary organ of an elephant which serves him in place of the knife-and-fork that Evolution has as yet denied him. For purposes of humor it is popularly called a trunk.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
PLAGUE, n. In ancient times a general punishment of the innocent for admonition of their ruler, as in the familiar instance of Pharaoh the Immune. The plague today . . . is merely Nature's fortuitous manifestation of her purposeless objectionableness.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
RECONCILIATION, n. A suspension of hostilities. An armed truce for the purpose of digging up the dead.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Finance is the art or science of managing revenues and resources for the best advantage of the manager
Ambrose Bierce
Image
WINE, n.Fermented grape-juice known to the Women's Christian Union as liquor, sometimes as rum. Wine, madam, is God's next best gift to man.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
mine, adj. Belonging to me if I can hold or seize it.
Ambrose Bierce