Quotes from Ambrose Bierce

Happiness is lost by criticizing it; sorrow by accepting it.

Happiness has not to all the same name: to Youth she is known as the Future; Age knows her as the Dream.

Historian - a broad-gauge gossip.

MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.

Boundary, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of another.

God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.

History – An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

History n: an account mostly false of events mostly unimportant which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves and soldiers mostly fools.

OVATION, n. n ancient Rome, a definite, formal pageant in honor of one who had been disserviceable to the enemies of the nation. A lesser "triumph."

Feast, n. A festival. A religious celebration usually signalized by gluttony and drunkenness, frequently in honor of some holy person distinguished for abstemiousness.

OBLIVION, n. Cold storage for high hopes. A place where ambitious authors meet their works without pride and their betters without envy. A dormitory without an alarm clock.

Hope is desire and expectation rolled into one.

Litigant. A person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bones.

Hope is an explorer who surveys the country ahead. That is why we know so much about the Hereafter and so little about the Heretofore.

The most affectionate creature in the world is a wet dog.

The covers of this book are too far apart.

Abscond - to move in a mysterious way, commonly with the property of another.

READING, n. The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in "dialect" and humor in slang.

ELEGY, n. A composition in verse, in which, without employing any of the methods of humor, the writer aims to produce in the reader's mind the dampest kind of dejection.

TELEPHONE n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

SPOOKER, n. A writer whose imagination concerns itself with supernatural phenomena, especially in the doings of spooks.

Liberty is one of the imagination's most precious possessions.

RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the conscience.

Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.