Ambrose Bierce Quotes on God (18 Quotes)

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

ROMANCE, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are. In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to probability, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination ...

Impiety. Your irreverence toward my deity.

REDEMPTION, n. Deliverance of sinners from the penalty of their sin, through their murder of the deity against whom they sinned .... whoso believeth in it shall not perish, but have everlasting life in which to try to understand it.

RITUALISM, n. A Dutch Garden of God where He may walk in rectilinear freedom, keeping off the grass.

PANTHEISM, n. The doctrine that everything is God, in contradistinction to the doctrine that God is everything.

UGLINESS, n. A gift of the gods to certain women, entailing virtue without humility.

RESPONSIBILITY, n. A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.

WRATH, n. Anger of a superior quality and degree, appropriate to exalted characters and momentous occasions as, 'the wrath of God,' 'the day of wrath,' etc....

MAMMON, n. The god of the world's leading religion. The chief temple is in the holy city of New York.

OATH, n. In law, a solemn appeal to the Deity, made binding upon the conscience by a penalty for perjury.

REVERENCE, n. The spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man.

UBIQUITY, n. The gift or power of being in all places at one time, but not in all places at all times, which is omnipresence, an attribute of God and the luminiferous ether only.

IMPIETY, n. Your irreverence toward my deity.

OLYMPIAN, adj. Relating to a mountain in Thessaly, once inhabited by gods, now a repository of yellowing newspapers, beer bottles and mutilated sardine cans, attesting the presence of the tourist and his appetite.

ABDOMEN, n. The temple of the god Stomach, in whose worship, with sacrificial rights, all true men engage. From women this ancient faith commands but a stammering assent. They sometimes minister at the altar in a half-hearted and ineffective way, but true reverence for the one deity that men really adore they know not. If woman had a free hand in the world's marketing the race would become graminivorous.

PRELATE, n. A church officer having a superior degree of holiness and a fat preferment. One of Heaven's aristocracy. A gentleman of God.

ZEUS, n. The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog.