Quote

Something that is supposed to typify or stand for something else. Many symbols are mere survivals - as funereal urns carved on memorial monuments. We cannot stop making them, but we can give them a name that conceals our helplessness.

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
Something
Stop
Memorial
Names
Monument
Making
Symbols
Urns
Else
Survival
Funereal
Cannot
Supposed
Conceals
Give
Mere
Carved
Many
Name
Monuments
Giving
Stand
Helplessness

More quotes by Ambrose Bierce

Image
Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
RABBLE, n. In a republic, those who exercise a supreme authority tempered by fraudulent elections. The rabble is like the sacred Simurgh, of Arabian fable - omnipotent on condition that it do nothing.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Contempt the feeling of a prudent man for an enemy who is too formidable safely to be opposed.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
WIDOW, n. A pathetic figure that the Christian world has agreed to take humorously, although Christ's tenderness towards widows was one of the most marked features of his character.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
POLICE, n. An armed force for protection and participation.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
A lottery is a tax on stupidity.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Cribbage, n. A substitute for conversation among those to whom nature has denied ideas.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theater of war.
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
GNOSTICS, n. A sect of philosophers who tried to engineer a fusion between the early Christians and the Platonists. The former would not go into the caucus and the combination failed, greatly to the chagrin of the fusion managers.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
A king's staff of office, the sign and symbol of his authority. It was originally a mace with which the sovereign admonished his jester and vetoed ministerial measures by breaking the bones of their proponents.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
The liberality of one who has much, in permitting one who has nothing to get all that he can.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
INDIFFERENT, adj. Imperfectly sensible to distinctions among things.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
EAT, v.i. To perform successively (and successfully) the functions of mastication, humectation, and deglutition.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Congratulations is the civility of envy.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
ACCOMPLICE, n. One associated with another in a crime, having guilty knowledge and complicity, as an attorney who defends a criminal, knowing him guilty. This view of the attorney's position in the matter has not hitherto commanded the assent of attorneys, no one having offered them a fee for assenting.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
MAGNETISM, n. Something acting upon a magnet. The two definitions immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue.
Ambrose Bierce