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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

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

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At war with savages and idiots. To be a Frenchman abroad is to be miserable to be an American abroad is to make others miserable.
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Accordion, n. An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.
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Coronation: The ceremony of investing a sovereign with the outward and visible signs of his divine right to be blown skyhigh with a dynamite bomb.
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Brain, v. [as in to brain]: To rebuke bluntly, but not pointedly to dispel a source of error in an opponent.
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Electricity is the power that causes all natural phenomena not known to be caused by something else
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Rome has seven sacraments, but the Protestant churches, being less prosperous, feel that they can afford only two, and these of inferior sanctity.
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PROVIDENTIAL, adj. Unexpectedly and conspicuously beneficial to the person so describing it.
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Miss: A title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the market. Miss, Misses (Mrs.) and Mister (Mr.) are the three most distinctly disagreeable words in the language, in sound and sense.
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Bigamy, n. A mistake in taste for which the wisdom of the future will adjudge a punishment called trigamy.
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In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale. Diversity of character is due to their unequal activity.
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Politeness, n: The most acceptable hypocrisy.
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CANNON, n. An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.
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INK, n. A villainous compound of tannogallate of iron, gum-arabic, and water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote intellectual crime.
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Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.
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ADDER, n. A species of snake. So called from its habit of adding funeral outlays to the other expenses of living.
Ambrose Bierce
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Snow pursued by the wind is not wholly unlike a retreating army. In the open field it ranges itself in ranks and battalions where it can get a foothold it makes a stand where it can take cover it does so. You may see whole platoons of snow cowering behind a bit of broken wall.
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Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.
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REASON, v.i. To weight probabilities in the scales of desire.
Ambrose Bierce
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Liberty is one of the imagination's most precious possessions.
Ambrose Bierce
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Happiness has not to all the same name: to Youth she is known as the Future Age knows her as the Dream.
Ambrose Bierce