Definite Apposites

Faith, n.
Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Language, n.
The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another’s treasure.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Learning, n.
The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Lecturer, n.
One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Lexicographer, n.
A pestilent fellow, who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to consider “as one having authority,” whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statute. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as “obsolete” or “obsolescent” and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor — whereby the process of impoverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, the bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that “it isn’t in the dictionary” — although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation — sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion — the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which the Creator had not created him to create.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Past, n.
That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs, the Future is the realm of song. In the one crouches Memory, clad in sackcloth and ashes, mumbling penitential prayer; in the sunshine of the other Hope flies with a free wing, beckoning to temples of success and bowers of ease. Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one — the knowledge and the dream.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.