Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
While you have a future do not live too much in contemplation of your past: unless you are content to walk backward the mirror is a poor guide.
Ambrose Bierce
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Poor
Guide
Future
Guides
Past
Mirror
Live
Content
Much
Mirrors
Walk
Unless
Backward
Walks
Contemplation
More quotes by Ambrose Bierce
Youth looks forward, for nothing is behind! Age backward, for nothing is before.
Ambrose Bierce
Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.
Ambrose Bierce
MULTITUDE, n. A crowd the source of political wisdom and virtue. In a republic, the object of the statesman's adoration.
Ambrose Bierce
One who, professing virtues that he does not respect, secures the advantage of seeming to be what he despises.
Ambrose Bierce
Self-restraint is indulgence of the propensity to forgo.
Ambrose Bierce
Distance, n. The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs and keep.
Ambrose Bierce
Fashion, n. A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey.
Ambrose Bierce
EMOTION, n. A prostrating disease caused by a determination of the heart to the head. It is sometimes accompanied by a copious discharge of hydrated chloride of sodium from the eyes.
Ambrose Bierce
LOVE, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder.
Ambrose Bierce
YANKEE, n. In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown.
Ambrose Bierce
HUMORIST, n. A plague that would have softened down the hoar austerity of Pharaoh's heart and persuaded him to dismiss Israel with his best wishes, cat-quick.
Ambrose Bierce
Human nature is pretty well balanced for every lacking virtue there is a rough substitute that will serve at a pinch--as cunning is the wisdom of the unwise, and ferocity the courage of the coward.
Ambrose Bierce
QUORUM, n. A sufficient number of members of a deliberative body to have their own way and their own way of having it. In the U.S. Senate a quorum consists of the chairman of the Committee on Finance and a messenger from the White House.
Ambrose Bierce
A miracle is an act or event out of the order of nature and unaccountable, as beating a normal hand of four kings and an ace with four aces and a king.
Ambrose Bierce
COMMENDATION n. The tribute that we pay to achievements that resembles but do not equal our own.
Ambrose Bierce
RATIONAL, adj. Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection.
Ambrose Bierce
Age is provident because the less future we have the more we fear it.
Ambrose Bierce
HOMOEOPATHY, n. A school of medicine midway between Allopathy and Christian Science. To the last both the others are distinctly inferior, for Christian Science will cure imaginary diseases, and they can not.
Ambrose Bierce
MAGNITUDE, n. Size [that is] purely relative. If everything in the universe were increased 1,000 diameters nothing would be any larger than it was before, but if one thing remain unchanged all the others would be larger than they had been.
Ambrose Bierce
Aborigines, n.: Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber they fertilize.
Ambrose Bierce