Love & Passion Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce defines beauty with a barbed, epigrammatic flourish that captures his signature stance from The Devil's Dictionary. Framed as a lexicon entry, the line treats language as a trapdoor: what seems a simple definition becomes a satire of love, marriage, and the male ego. The antithesis does the work. A lover is charmed, open to enchantment and risk; a husband is terrified, haunted by loss, jealousy, and the erosion of control. The same feminine beauty that inspires pursuit in courtship becomes a destabilizing force once possession is presumed.

The joke turns on a bleak insight about how social roles rewire perception. Desire casts a halo; ownership breeds paranoia. A lover sees possibility; a husband sees threats, rivals, aging, betrayal. That shift indicts not women but the patriarchal habits that make a wife an asset to guard. By calling beauty a power, Bierce grants women agency, yet he also exposes how that power is defined and feared within a male gaze. The line compresses a culture of double standards into a single pivot between charm and terror.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, amid Victorian moral codes and the cult of domesticity, Bierce skewered romantic sentimentality as self-interest in fancy dress. His war-tempered cynicism recurs here: love is not a transcendent union but a transaction that becomes fraught once the ledger changes. The humor lands because it is precise about human frailty. Marriage promises security; beauty refuses to be secured.

Stylistically, the clipped dictionary form parodies authority while delivering a paradox. Beauty both enthralls and unsettles, exposing how institutions try to fix what is, by nature, volatile. The line invites a laugh and then a wince, revealing the insecurity beneath romantic ideals and the power dynamics that make charm and terror two sides of the same coin.