Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary Quotes

MIND: A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

Inhumanity:One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.

Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.

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

Lawyer One skilled in the circumvention of the law.

Christian: one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.

Forgetfulness - a gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

Immortality: A toy which people cry for, And on their knees apply for, Dispute, contend and lie for, And if allowed Would be right proud Eternally to die for.

Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

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.

Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull

Philanthropist. A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.

Doubt, indulged and cherished, is in danger of becoming denial; but if honest, and bent on thorough investigation, it may soon lead to full establishment of the truth.

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

Curiosity:An objectionable quality of the female mind. The desire to know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul.

Prejudice - a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.

Present:That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.