Daily Inspiration Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce’s joke lands because it pretends to define egotism while quietly confessing to it. The “low taste” isn’t moral depravity so much as bad aesthetic judgment: the egotist commits the social sin of choosing the wrong object of fascination. Then Bierce snaps the camera around with that final clause, “more interested in himself than in me,” turning what could have been a tidy, superior diagnosis into an indictment of the speaker’s own vanity. The punchline isn’t that egotists are annoying; it’s that the person calling someone an egotist is usually auditioning for attention, too.

The subtext is pure Bierce: cynicism disguised as wit, wit sharpened into a weapon. He’s mocking a familiar rhetorical move in polite society and public discourse alike: pathologize someone else’s self-regard to elevate your own. By making “me” the measure of “taste,” he exposes how often our standards are just our preferences wearing a necktie.

Context matters. Bierce wrote as a journalist in the Gilded Age, a period thick with self-made mythmaking, boosterism, and moralizing editorials. His Devil’s Dictionary specialty was puncturing the era’s inflated language with definitions that show the grubby motives underneath. Here, he collapses a whole social ecosystem - status anxiety, competitiveness, the hunger to be centered - into a single reversal. It’s not a call to humility. It’s a reminder that even our critiques of narcissism can be another form of narcissism, only with better diction.