How God makes righteousness and roses grow.
In spiritual matters material aids are not to be despised: by the use of an organ and a painted window an artistic emotion can be made to seem a religious ecstasy.
The poor man's price of admittance to the favor of the rich is his self-respect. It assures him a seat in the gallery.
One may know oneself ugly, but there is no mirror for the understanding.
If the righteous thought death what they think they think it they would search less diligently for divine ordinances against suicide.
Weep not for cruelty to rogues in jail:
Injustice can the just alone assail.
Deny compassion to the wretch who swerved,
Till all who, fainting, walked aright are served.
The artless woman may be known by her costume: her gown is trimmed with feathers of the white blackbird.
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.
Slang is a foul pool at which every dunce fills his bucket, and then sets up as a fountain.
The present is the frontier between the desert of the past and the garden of the future. It is redrawn every moment.
The virtue that is not automatic requires more attention than it is worth.
At sunset our shadows reach the stars, yet we are no greater at death than at the noon of life.
Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce the errors of youth for those of age.
From childhood to youth is eternity; from youth to manhood, a season. Age comes in a night and is incredible.
Avoid the disputatious. When you greet an acquaintance with "How are you?" and he replies: "On the contrary, how are you?" pass on.
If all thought were audible none would be deemed discreditable. We know, indeed, that bad thoughts are universal, but that is not the same thing as catching them at being so.
"All the souls in this place have been happy ever since you blundered into it," said Satan, ejecting Hope. "You make trouble wherever you go."
Our severest retorts are unanswerable because nobody is present to answer them.
The angels have good dreams and bad, and we are the dreams. When an angel wakes one of us dies.
The man of "honor" pays his bet
By saving on his lawful debt.
When he to Nature pays his dust
(Not for he would, but for he must)
Men say, "He settled that, 'tis true,
But, faith, it long was overdue."
Do not permit a woman to ask forgiveness, for that is only the first step. The second is justification of herself by accusation of you.
If we knew nothing was behind us we should discern our true relation to the universe.
Youth has the sun and the stars by which to determine his position on the sea of life; Age must sail by dead reckoning and knows not whither he is bound.
Happiness is lost by criticising it; sorrow by accepting it.
As Nature can not make us altogether wretched she resorts to the trick of contrast by making us sometimes almost happy.
When prosperous the fool trembles for the evil that is to come; in adversity the philosopher smiles for the good that he has had.
When God saw how faulty was man He tried again and made woman. As to why He then stopped there are two opinions. One of them is woman's.
She hated him because he discovered that her lark was a crow. He hated her because she unlocked the cage of his beast.
"Who art thou?"
"Friendship."
"I am Love; let us travel together."
"Yes—for a day's journey; then thou arrivest at thy grave."
"And thou?"
"I go as far as the grave of Advantage."
Look far enough ahead and always thou shalt see the domes and spires of the City of Contentment.
You would say of that old man: "He is bald and bent." No; in the presence of Death he uncovers and bows.
If you saw Love pictured as clad in furs you would smile. Yet every year has its winter.
You can not disprove the Great Pyramid by showing the impossibility of putting the stones in place.
Men were singing the praises of Justice.
"Not so loud," said an angel; "if you wake her she will put you all to death."
Age, with his eyes in the back of his head, thinks it wisdom to see the bogs through which he has floundered.
Wisdom is known only by contrasting it with folly; by shadow only we perceive that all visible objects are not flat. Yet Philanthropos would abolish evil!
One whose falsehoods no longer deceive has forfeited the right to speak truth.
Wisdom is a special knowledge in excess of all that is known.
To live is to believe. The most credulous of mortals is he who is persuaded of his incredulity.
In him who has never wronged another, revenge is a virtue.
That you can not serve God and Mammon is a poor excuse for not serving God.
A fool's tongue is not so noisy but the wise can hear his ear commanding them to silence.
If the Valley of Peace could be reached only by the path of love, it would be sparsely inhabited.
To the eye of failure success is an accident with a presumption of crime.
Wearing his eyes in his heart, the optimist falls over his own feet, and calls it Progress.
You can calculate your distance from Hell by the number of wayside roses. They are thickest at the hither end of the route.
The world was made a sphere in order that men should not push one another off, but the landowner smiles when he thinks of the sea.
Let not the night on thy resentment fall:
Strike when the wrong is fresh, or not at all.
The lion ceases if his first leap fail—
'Tis only dogs that nose a cooling trail.
Having given out all the virtues that He had made, God made another.
"Give us that also," said His children.
"Nay," He replied, "if I give you that you will slay one another till none is left. You shall have only its name, which is Justice."
"That is a good name," they said; "we will give it to a virtue of our own creation."
So they gave it to Revenge.
The sea-bird speeding from the realm of night
Dashes to death against the beacon-light.
Learn from its evil fate, ambitious soul,
The ministry of light is guide, not goal.
While you have a future do not live too much in contemplation of your past: unless you are content to walk backward the mirror is a poor guide.
"O dreadful Death, why veilest thou thy face?"
"To spare me thine impetuous embrace."
He who knows himself great accepts the truth in reverent silence, but he who only believes himself great has embraced a noisy faith.
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.
Seek not for happiness—'tis known
To hope and memory alone;
At dawn—how bright the noon will be!
At eve—how fair it glowed, ah, me!
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.
Study good women and ignore the rest,
For he best knows the sex who knows the best.
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.
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."
How blind is he who, powerless to discern
The glories that about his pathway burn,
Walks unaware the avenues of Dream,
Nor sees the domes of Paradise agleam!
O Golden Age, to him more nobly planned
Thy light lies ever upon sea and land.
From sordid scenes he lifts his eyes at will,
And sees a Grecian god on every hill!
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.
Footnotes:
[A]
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:
Fill me, boy, as deep a draught
As e'er was filled, as e'er was quaffed;
But let the water amply flow
To cool the grape's intemperate glow.
For though the bowl's the grave of sadness
Ne'er let it be the birth of madness
No! banish from our board to night
The revelries of rude delight
To Scythians leave these wild excesses
Ours be the joy that soothes and blesses!
And while the temperate bowl we wreathe
In concert let our voices breathe
Beguiling every hour along
With harmony of soul and song
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.
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[B]
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
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[C]
I.e. one of the lady's hands.
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The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 / Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales Page 21
