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
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
Image
RIDICULE, n. Words designed to show that the person of whom they are uttered is devoid of the dignity of character distinguishing him who utters them.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
WINE, n.Fermented grape-juice known to the Women's Christian Union as liquor, sometimes as rum. Wine, madam, is God's next best gift to man.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Clairvoyant, n.: A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron - namely, that he is a blockhead.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
PRESENTABLE, adj. Hideously appareled after the manner of the time and place.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
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
Image
HEART, n. Figuratively, this useful organ is said to be the seat of emotions and sentiments . . . . It is now known that sentiments and emotions reside in the stomach, being evolved from food by chemical action of the gastric fluid.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
pleasure, n. The least hateful form of dejection.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
USAGE, n. The First Person of the literary Trinity, the Second and Third being Custom and Conventionality. Imbued with a decent reverence for this Holy Triad an industrious writer may hope to produce books that will live as long as the fashion.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
A statesman who shakes the fruit trees of his neighbors - to dislodge the worms.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
REFERENDUM, n. A law for submission of proposed legislation to a popular vote to learn the nonsensus of public opinion.
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
LEGACY, n. A gift from one who is legging it out of this vale of tears.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Fear has no brains it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
RATTLESNAKE, n. Our prostrate brother, Homo ventrambulans.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of remarkable Christian forbearance among men - were it not for a mawkish humanitarianism, coupled with imperfect digestive powers, we should devour our young, as Nature intended.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
If you would be accounted great by your contemporaries, be not too much greater than they.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Incompatibility. In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination.
Ambrose Bierce
Image
Fidelity - a virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.
Ambrose Bierce