Quotes from Ambrose Bierce

This irrascible and implacable brute—this incarnate thunderbolt—this monster of the upper deep, I had seen reposing in the shade of an adjacent tree, dreaming dreams of conquest and glory.

Like a plant that has struck its root into some poisonous mineral, my poor uncle was dying slowly upward.

The fever of battle burned hot in its heart; its brain was intoxicated with the wine of strife.

When Death comes cloaked in mystery, he is terrible indeed.

It fought, like the angels and devils, in mid-air, cleaving the atmosphere like a bird, describing a parabolic curve and descending upon its victim at just the exact angle of incidence to make the most of its velocity and weight.

DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

Gravitación, s. Tendencia de todos los cuerpos a acercarse unos a otros con fuerza proporcional a la cantidad de materia que contienen; la cantidad de materia que contienen se determina por la tendencia a acercarse unos a otros. Bello y edificante ejemplo de cómo la ciencia, después de hacer de A la prueba de B, hace de B la prueba de A.

Ugliness, n.: A gift of the gods to certain women, entailing virtue without humility.

They were obviously headstones of graves, though the graves themselves no longer existed as either mounds or depressions; the years had leveled all. Scattered here and there, more massive blocks showed where some pompous or ambitious monument had once flung its feeble defiance at oblivion.

Poverty and zeal are an upper and a nether millstone.  It is dangerous to make a third in that kind of sandwich.

If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it.

IRRELIGION, n. The principal one of the great faiths of the world.

In the army of indigence the uniform is rags; they serve to distinguish the rank and file from the recruiting officers.

Mesmerism, n. Hypnotism before it wore good clothes, kept a carriage and asked Incredulity to dinner.

The properties of ink are peculiar and contradictory: it may be used to make reputations and unmake them; to blacken them and to make them white; but it is most generally and acceptably employed as a mortar to bind together the stones of an edifice of fame, and as a whitewash to conceal afterward the rascal quality of the material.

Before undergoing a surgical operation, arrange your temporal affairs. You may live.

An Italian proverb says: The furrier gets the skins of more foxes than asses.

Good stranger, I continued, I am ill and lost. Direct me, I beseech you, to Carcosa

The infallible teacher is still in the forest primeval, throwing seeds to the white blackbirds

Ä°ki cinsin kat?l?m?n? gerektiren danslar?n iki ortak özelliÄŸi vard?r: Dikkat çekici biçimde masumdurlar ve niyeti kötü olanlar taraf?ndan sevilirler.

It is one of the important uses of civility to signify resentment.

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

When the man was dead an examination disclosed the unmistakable marks of an animal's fangs deeply sunken into the jugular vein. But there was no animal.

Halpin was pretty generally deprecated as an intellectual black sheep who was likely at any moment to disgrace the flock by bleating in metre. The Tennessee Fraysers were a practical folk - not practical in the popular sense of devotion to sordid pursuits, but having a robust contempt for any qualities unfitting a man for the wholesome vocation of politics.