“Neighbor, n. One whom we are commanded to love as ourselves, and who does all he knows how to make us disobedient.”
The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
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Ambrose Bierce 204
American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabu… 1842–1914Related quotes
IV, 18
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV
To Die Before Death: The Sufi Way of Life (1997)
“For in order to command well, we should know how to submit; and he who submits with a good grace will some time become worthy of commanding.”
Nam et qui bene imperat, paruerit aliquando necesse est, et qui modeste paret, videtur qui aliquando imperet dignus esse.
Book III, section 2; translation by Francis Barham
De Legibus (On the Laws)
Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 270
“The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves”
Section 100
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)
Context: The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
It is not love of self but hatred of self which is at the root of the troubles that afflict our world.
"The Great Explosion" in the posthumous publication The Beginning and the End (1973)
Context: He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like
Dante's Florence, no anthropoid God
Making commandments: this is the God who does not
care and will never cease. Look at the seas there
Flashing against this rock in the darkness — look at the
tide-stream stars — and the fall of nations — and dawn
Wandering with wet white feet down the Carmel Valley
to meet the sea. These are real and we see their beauty.
The great explosion is probably only a metaphor — I know
not — of faceless violence, the root of all things.
National Book Award Acceptance Speech (1957)
Context: It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; that constitute his ideal audience and his better self. To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men. And he speaks not in private grunts and mutterings but in the public language of the dictionary, of literary tradition, and of the street. Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the products something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.