Ambrose Quotes

IMPOSTOR n. A rival aspirant to public honors.

Finance is the art or science of managing revenues and resources for the best advantage of the manager

A popular writer writes about what people think. A wise writer offers them something to think about.

One engaged in a commercial pursuit. A commercial pursuit is one in which the thing pursued is a dollar.

To renounce an honor for an advantage. To renounce an advantage for a greater advantage.

A violin is the revenge exacted by the intestines of a dead cat.

An archbishop is an ecclesiastical dignitary one point holier than a bishop.

An immaterial but visible being that inhabited the air when the air was an element and before it was fatally polluted with factory smoke, sewer gas and similar products of civilization.

Legitimate authority to be, to do or to have; as the right to be a king, the right to do one's neighbor, the right to have measles, and the like.

I was born to poor because of honest parents.

The palmist looks at the wrinkles made by closing the hand and says they signify character. The philosopher reads character by what the hand most loves to close upon.

San Francisco is the place where most people were last seen

Age is provident because the less future we have the more we fear it.

Slang is a foul pool at which every dunce fills his bucket, and then sets up as a fountain.

When prosperous the fool trembles for the evil that is to come; in adversity the philosopher smiles for the good that he has had.

Every heart is the lair of a ferocious animal. The greatest wrong that you can put upon a man is to provoke him to let out his beast.

Human nature is pretty well balanced; for every lacking virtue there is a rough substitute that will serve at a pinch--as cunning is the wisdom of the unwise, and ferocity the courage of the coward.

When publicly censured our first instinct is to make everybody a codefendant.

TRUTHFUL, adj. Dumb and illiterate.

Fear has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated.

An army's bravest men are its cowards. The death which they would not meet at the hands of the enemy they will meet at the hands of their officers, with never a flinching.

Self-evident, adj. Evident to one's self and to nobody else.

To Dogmatism the Spirit of Inquiry is the same as the Spirit of Evil.

Twice – Once too often.

Conversation: A fair for the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement of his own wares to observe those of his neighbor.

Christian - One who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

Convictions are variable; to be always consistent is to be sometimes dishonest.

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!

DEGRADATION, n. One of the stages of moral and social progress from private station to political preferment.

REVEILLE, n. A signal to sleeping soldiers to dream of battlefields no more, but get up and have their blue noses counted.

Hurry n: The dispatch of bunglers.

CALUMNUS, n. A graduate of the School for Scandal.

MUGWUMP, n. In politics one afflicted with self-respect and addicted to the vice of independence. A term of contempt.

DECIDE, v.i. To succumb to the preponderance of one set of influences over another set.

If you would be accounted great by your contemporaries, be not too much greater than they.

IGNORAMUS, n. A person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself, and having certain other kinds that you know nothing about.

FORCE, n. "Force is but might," the teacher said p/ "That definition's just."/ The boy said naught but throught instead,/ Remembering his pounded head:/ "Force is not might but must!"

DECALOGUE, n. A series of commandments, ten in number - just enough to permit an intelligent selection for observance, but not enough to embarrass the choice.

PLEONASM, n. An army of words escorting a corporal of thought.

WASHINGTONIAN, n. A Potomac tribesman who exchanged the privilege of governing himself for the advantage of good government. In justice to him it should be said that he did not want to.

BEG, v. To ask for something with an earnestness proportioned to the belief that it will not be given.

BATH, n. A kind of mystic ceremony substituted for religious worship, with what spiritual efficacy has not been determined.

A trite popular saying, or proverb. (Figurative and colloquial.) So called because it makes its way into a wooden head. Following are examples of old saws fitted with new teeth.

GRAVE, n. A place in which the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student.

COMMENDATION n. The tribute that we pay to achievements that resembles but do not equal our own.

PROVIDENTIAL, adj. Unexpectedly and conspicuously beneficial to the person so describing it.

TAIL, n. The part of an animal's spine that has transcended its natural limitations to set up an independent existence in a world of its own.

PASTIME, n. A device for promoting dejection. Gentle exercise for intellectual debility.

DELUSION, n. The father of a most respectable family, comprising Enthusiasm, Affection, Self-denial, Faith, Hope, Charity and many other goodly sons and daughters.

MAGIC, n. An art of converting superstition into coin. There are other arts serving the same high purpose, but the discreet lexicographer does not name them.