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To be comic is merely to be playful, but wit is a serious matter. To laugh at it is to confess that you do not understand.

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
Matter
Confess
Wit
Comic
Merely
Laugh
Laughing
Serious
Understand
Playful

More quotes by Ambrose Bierce

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A violin is the revenge exacted by the intestines of a dead cat.
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NIHILIST, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi.
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RIMER, n. A poet regarded with indifference or disesteem.
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Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
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WASHINGTONIAN, n. A Potomac tribesman who exchanged the privilege of governing himself for the advantage of good government. In justice to him it should be said that he did not want to.
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ZEUS /n./ The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog.
Ambrose Bierce
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Male, A member of the unconsidered or negligible gender. The male of the human race is commonly known to the female as Mere Man. The Genus has two varieties: good providers and bad providers.
Ambrose Bierce
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Wit - the salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.
Ambrose Bierce
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Alien - an American sovereign in his probationary state.
Ambrose Bierce
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Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
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ADMINISTRATION, n. An ingenious abstraction in politics, designed to receive the kicks and cuffs due to the premier or president. A man of straw, proof against bad-egging and dead-catting.
Ambrose Bierce
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EXCEPTION, n. A thing which takes the liberty to differ from other things of its class, as an honest man, a truthful woman, etc.
Ambrose Bierce
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ELEGY, n. A composition in verse, in which, without employing any of the methods of humor, the writer aims to produce in the reader's mind the dampest kind of dejection.
Ambrose Bierce
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MERCY, n. An attribute beloved of detected offenders.
Ambrose Bierce
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Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.
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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PREDESTINATION, n. The doctrine that all things occur according to programme. . . . not be confused with that of foreordination. The difference is great enough to have deluged Christendom with ink, to say nothing of the gore.
Ambrose Bierce
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Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Ambrose Bierce
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WHANGDEPOOTENAWAH, n. In the Ojibwa tongue, disaster an unexpected affliction that strikes hard.
Ambrose Bierce
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Fear has no brains it is an idiot.
Ambrose Bierce