Quote

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

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
Comic
Merely
Laugh
Laughing
Serious
Understand
Playful
Matter
Confess
Wit

More quotes by Ambrose Bierce

Image
GUILLOTINE, n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Age - That period of life in which we compound for the vices that remain by reviling those we have no longer the vigor to commit.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
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
Image
SCRAP-BOOK, n. A book that is commonly edited by a fool. Many persons of some small distinction compile scrap-books containing whatever they happen to read about themselves or employ others to collect.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
NOUMENON, n. That which exists, as distinguished from that which merely seems to exist, the latter being a phenomenon. The noumenon is a bit difficult to locate it can be apprehended only by a process of reasoning - which is a phenomenon.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Turkey: A large bird whose flesh, when eaten on certain religious anniversaries has the peculiar property of attesting piety and gratitude.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
DELEGATION, n. In American politics, an article of merchandise that comes in sets.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Take not God's name in vain select a time when it will have effect.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
To bother about the best method of accomplishing an accidental result.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
MULTITUDE, n. A crowd the source of political wisdom and virtue. In a republic, the object of the statesman's adoration.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
LEAD, n. A heavy blue-gray metal much used in giving stability to light lovers - particularly to those who love not wisely but other men's wives.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Brain: an apparatus with which we think that we think. Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
PHYSIOGNOMY, n. The art of determining the character of another by the resemblances and differences between his face and our own, which is the standard of excellence.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Age is provident because the less future we have the more we fear it.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
CERBERUS, n. The watch-dog of Hades, whose duty it was to guard the entrance - against whom or what does not clearly appear everybody, sooner or later, had to go there, and nobody wanted to carry off the entrance.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
plagiarism, n. A literary coincidence compounded of a discreditable priority and an honorable subsequence.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
The partisan strife in which the people of the country are permitted to periodically engage does not tend to the development of ugly traits of character, but merely discloses those that preexist.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Clarinet n. An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments worse than a clarinet – two clarinets.
Ambrose Bierce