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A popular character in old Italian plays, who imitated with ludicrous incompetence the buffone, or clown, and was therefore the ape of an ape for the clown himself imitated the serious characters of the play.

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
Play
Popularity
Italian
Plays
Popular
Imitated
Characters
Ludicrous
Therefore
Incompetence
Serious
Apes
Character
Clown

More quotes by Ambrose Bierce

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FOLLY, n. That gift and faculty divine whose creative and controlling energy inspires Man's mind, guides his actions and adorns his life.
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DEJEUNER, n. The breakfast of an American who has been in Paris. Variously pronounced.
Ambrose Bierce
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DIAPHRAGM, n. A muscular partition separating disorders of the chest from disorders of the bowels.
Ambrose Bierce
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INTENTION, n. The mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of an involuntary act.
Ambrose Bierce
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Distance, n. The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs and keep.
Ambrose Bierce
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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
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APHORISM, n. Predigested wisdom. The flabby wine-skin of his brain Yields to some pathologic strain, And voids from its unstored abysm The driblet of an aphorism. The Mad Philosopher, 1697
Ambrose Bierce
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Men who expect universal peace through invention of destructive weapons of war are no wiser than one who, noting the improvement of agricultural implements, should prophesy an end to the tilling of the soil.
Ambrose Bierce
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Road, n. A strip of land along which one may pass from where it is too tiresome to be to where it is futile to go.
Ambrose Bierce
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picture, n. A representation in two dimensions of something wearisome in three.
Ambrose Bierce
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LIVER, n. A large red organ thoughtfully provided by nature to be bilious with. The liver is heaven's best gift to the goose without it that bird would be unable to supply us with the Strasbourg pate.
Ambrose Bierce
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General, said the commander of the delinquent brigade, I am persuaded that any further display of valor by my troops will bring them into collision with the enemy.
Ambrose Bierce
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IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.
Ambrose Bierce
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An army's bravest men are its cowards. The death which they would not meet at the hands of the enemy they will meet at the hands of their officers, with never a flinching.
Ambrose Bierce
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Laziness. Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.
Ambrose Bierce
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PRE-ADAMITE, n. One of an experimental and apparently unsatisfactory race of antedated Creation. . . . Little its known of them beyond the fact that they supplied Cain with a wife and theologians with a controversy.
Ambrose Bierce
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CLOCK, n. A machine of great moral value to man, allaying his concern for the future by reminding him what a lot of time remains to him.
Ambrose Bierce
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TRUTHFUL, adj. Dumb and illiterate.
Ambrose Bierce
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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
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TEDIUM, n. Ennui, the state or condition of one that is bored. Many fanciful derivations of the word have been affirmed, but so high an authority as Father Jape says that it comes from a very obvious source --the first words of the ancient Latin hymn _Te Deum Laudamus_. In this apparently natural derivation there is something that saddens.
Ambrose Bierce