This Is a Beta Version. Feel free to play around, but your submissions, comments, settings, ratings, and/or other data may suddenly disappear or return to a previous state. The old version is more stable. Please send your ideas, complaints and other comments to webmaster@aphorismsgalore.com. Thank you.

Ambrose Bierce

American author and journalist; b. 1842; d. 1913

Aphorisms Attributed to This Aphorist

<< < 21–29 (29)  ·  Submit an Aphorism

#  ·  **-- Not So Good (9 ratings)  ·  submitted 1997

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum — "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am."

Ambrose Bierce, in Wisdom and Ignorance

#  ·  **-- Not So Good (21 ratings)  ·  submitted 1997

Coward: one who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.

Ambrose Bierce, in Vice and Virtue and War and Peace

#  ·  **-- Not So Good (14 ratings)  ·  submitted 1997

Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one's country.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, in Law and Politics

#  ·  **-- Not So Good (11 ratings)  ·  submitted 1997

Helpmate: A wife, or bitter half.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, in Love and Hate

#  ·  **-- Not So Good (30 ratings)  ·  submitted 1997

In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary, "patriotism" is defined as the last resort of the scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first.

Ambrose Bierce, in Law and Politics

#  ·  **-- Not So Good (145 ratings)  ·  submitted 1997

Incompatibility: In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, in Love and Hate

#  ·  **-- Not So Good (13 ratings)  ·  submitted 1997

It has been observed that one's nose is never so happy as when it is thrust into the affairs of another, from which some physiologists have drawn the inference that the nose is devoid of the sense of smell.

Ambrose Bierce, in Vice and Virtue

#  ·  **-- Not So Good (8 ratings)  ·  submitted 1997

Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify.

Ambrose Bierce, in Wisdom and Ignorance

#  ·  **-- Not So Good (11 ratings)  ·  submitted 1997

The covers of this book are too far apart.

Ambrose Bierce, in Altruism and Cynicism

<< < 21–29 (29)  ·  Submit an Aphorism