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

Life is a little plot of light. We enter, clasp a hand or two, and go our several ways back into the darkness. The mystery is infinitely pathetic and picturesque.

Cheerfulness is the religion of the little. The low hills are a-smirk with flowers and greenery; the dominating peaks, austere and desolate, holding a prophecy of doom.

It is not to our credit that women like best the men who are not as other men, nor to theirs that they are not particular as to the nature of the difference.

In the journey of life when thy shadow falls to the westward stop until it falls to the eastward. Thou art then at thy destination.

Brain was given to test the heart's credibility as a witness, yet the philosopher's lady is almost as fine as the clown's wench.

"Who art thou, so sorrowful?"

"Ingratitude. It saddens me to look upon the devastations of Benevolence."

"Then veil thine eyes, for I am Benevolence."

"Wretch! thou art my father and my mother."

Death is the only prosperity that we neither desire for ourselves nor resent in others.

To the small part of ignorance that we can arrange and classify we give the name Knowledge.

"I wish to enter," said the soul of the voluptuary.

"I am told that all the beautiful women are here."

"Enter," said Satan, and the soul of the voluptuary passed in.

"They make the place what it is," added Satan, as the gates clanged.

Woman would be more charming if one could fall into her arms without falling into her hands.

Think not to atone for wealth by apology: you must make restitution to the accuser.

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.

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.

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.

Life and Death threw dice for a child.

"I win!" cried Life.

"True," said Death, "but you need a nimbler tongue to proclaim your luck. The stake is already dead of age."

In childhood we expect, in youth demand, in manhood hope, and in age beseech.

A violet softly sighed, A hollyhock shouted above.In the heart of the violet, pride; In the heart of the hollyhock, love.

If women knew themselves the fact that men do not know them would flatter them less and content them more.

The angel with a flaming sword slept at his post, and Eve slipped back into the Garden. "Thank Heaven! I am again in Paradise," said Adam.

It may be noted here that the popular conception of this poet as a frivolous sensualist is unsustained by evidence and repudiated by all having knowledge of the matter. Although love and wine were his constant themes, there is good ground for the belief that he wrote of them with greater abandon than he indulged in them—a not uncommon practice of the poet-folk, by the way, and one to which those who sing of deeds of arms are perhaps especially addicted. The great age which Anacreon attained points to a temperate life; and he more than once denounces intoxication with as great zeal as a modern reformer who has eschewed the flagon for the trencher. According to Anacreon, drunkenness is "the vice of barbarians;" though, for the matter of that, it is difficult to say what achievable vice is not. In Ode LXII, he sings:

Maximus of Tyre speaking of Polycrates the Tyrant (tyrant, be it remembered, meant only usurper, not oppressor) considered the happiness of that potentate, secure because he had a powerful navy and such a friend as Anacreon—the word navy naturally suggesting cold water, and cold water, Anacreon.

On this passage Tyrwhit makes the following judicious comment: The school of Oxford seems to have been in much the same estimation for its dancing as that of Stratford for its French—alluding of course to what is, said in the Prologue of the French spoken by the Prioress:

And French she spoke full fayre and fetislyAfter the scole of Stratford atte boweFor French of Paris was to hire unknowe