Quotes from Ambrose Bierce

You don't have to be stupid to be a Christian, ... but it probably helps.

Adolescence: A stage between infancy and adultery.

Conversation: A fair for the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement of his own wares to observe those of his neighbor.

Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.

Responsibility n: A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God Fate Fortune Luck or one's neighbour. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.

Pray v: to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

In the algebra of psychology, X stands for a woman's heart.

Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.

HYDRA, n. A kind of animal that the ancients catalogued under many heads.

ENTERTAINMENT, n. Any kind of amusement whose inroads stop short of death by injection.

LINEN, n. "A kind of cloth the making of which, when made of hemp, entails a great waste of hemp."

BAIT, n. A preparation that renders the hook more palatable. The best kind is beauty.

RECREATION, n. A particular kind of dejection to relieve a general fatigue.

BLANK-VERSE, n. Unrhymed iambic pentameters - the most difficult kind of English verse to write acceptably; a kind, therefore, much affected by those who cannot acceptably write any kind.

SARCOPHAGUS, n. Among the Greeks a coffin which being made of a certain kind of carnivorous stone, had the peculiar property of devouring the body placed in it.

Kindness n: A brief preface to ten volumes of exaction.

Barometer, n.: An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having.

Doubt begins only at the last frontiers of what is possible.

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.

Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.

Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Irreligion - the principal one of the great faiths of the world.

Scriptures - The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

Prejudice - a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.