The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 / Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales

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

Intolerance is natural and logical, for in every dissenting opinion lies an assumption of superior wisdom.

'Who art thou?' said Saint Peter at the Gate.

'I am known as Memory.'

'What presumption!—go back to Hell. And who, perspiring friend, art thou?'

'My name is Satan. I am looking for——'

'Take your penal apparatus and be off.'

And Satan, laying hold of Memory, said: 'Come along, you scoundrel! you make happiness wherever you are not.'

Women of genius commonly have masculine faces, figures and manners. In transplanting brains to an alien soil God leaves a little of the original earth clinging to the roots.

The heels of Detection are sore from the toes of Remorse.

Twice we see Paradise. In youth we name it Life; in age, Youth.

There are but ten Commandments, true,
But that's no hardship, friend, to you;
The sins whereof no line is writ
You're not commanded to commit.

Fear of the darkness is more than an inherited superstition—it is at night, mostly, that the king thinks.

'Who art thou?' said Mercy.

'Revenge, the father of Justice.'

'Thou wearest thy son's clothing.'

'One must be clad.'

'Farewell—I go to attend thy son.'

'Thou wilt find him hiding in yonder jungle.'

Self-denial is indulgence of a propensity to forego.

Men talk of selecting a wife; horses, of selecting an owner.

You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute. You are avenged fourteen hundred and forty times a day.

A sweetheart is a bottle of wine; a wife is a wine-bottle.

He gets on best with women who best knows how to get on without them.

'Who am I?' asked an awakened soul.

'That is the only knowledge that is denied to you here,' answered a smiling angel; 'this is Heaven.'

Woman's courage is ignorance of danger; man's is hope of escape.

When God had finished this terrestrial frame
And all things else, with or without a name,
The Nothing that remained within His hand
Said: 'Make me into something fine and grand,
Thine angels to amuse and entertain.'
God heard and made it into human brain.

If you wish to slay your enemy make haste, O make haste, for already Nature's knife is at his throat and yours.

To most persons a sense of obligation is insupportable; beware upon whom you inflict it.

Bear me, good oceans, to some isle
Where I may never fear
The snake alurk in woman's smile,
The tiger in her tear.
Yet bear not with me her, O deeps,
Who never smiles and never weeps.