Love & Passion Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce turns a dictionary entry into a tiny weapon: beauty isn’t an ideal, it’s leverage. The gag lands because it refuses the usual reverence and replaces it with a cold social geometry. “Power” is the operative word. Beauty, in this formulation, isn’t a trait a woman possesses so much as a force that rearranges men’s behavior - desire on one side, dread on the other.

The split between “lover” and “husband” is the real punchline, and it’s mean on purpose. The lover is pure appetite, safely temporary; he can be “charmed” because he’s playing for pleasure, not stability. The husband is the man with something to lose: status, money, certainty, control. Beauty “terrifies” him because it implies options. It suggests that attraction is a market, not a vow, and that a wife’s desirability makes her less containable. Bierce is skewering marriage as an institution built as much on possession and anxiety as on affection.

There’s also a sharp, uncomfortable subtext about women’s agency in a period that constrained it. In a world where formal power was denied, beauty becomes an informal currency - a way to negotiate, disrupt, or escape. Bierce’s cynicism lets him acknowledge that reality while still smuggling in a barb at men: your romantic ideals are just self-serving stories, and your “security” is fear with better manners.

Written in the idiom of The Devil’s Dictionary, the line belongs to a post-Victorian mood of disillusionment: morality dressed up as comedy, comedy sharpened into indictment.