Quotes by Ambrose Bierce

Beauty, n: the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.

Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify we give the name of knowledge.

Ardor, n. The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.

Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

Prescription: A physicians guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.

Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is - it is her shadow.

Friendless. Having no favors to bestow. Destitute of fortune. Addicted to utterance of truth and common sense.

To be positive is to be mistaken at the top of ones voice.

Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of ones voice.

Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.

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.

Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.

Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.

Jealous, adj. Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.

Doubt is the father of invention.

Liberty: One of Imaginations most precious possessions.

Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.