Daily Inspiration Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce’s definition lands like a tiny guillotine: it doesn’t just insult the bore, it exposes the listener. The line is engineered to flip the usual moral hierarchy. We’re trained to think boredom is caused by someone else’s dullness; Bierce suggests it’s also a power struggle over attention. A “bore” isn’t objectively tedious so much as guilty of violating the social contract you had in your head: I’m ready to receive, therefore you should perform appropriately - or better yet, shut up.

The subtext is chilly and modern. Conversation, in Bierce’s view, isn’t a warm exchange of selves; it’s a contested resource, with “listen” functioning as a demand disguised as virtue. The punch is in the asymmetry: the bore’s crime is “talks,” but the speaker’s desire is not to talk back - it’s to be listened to. Bierce makes vanity the hidden protagonist. You want him to listen because you’ve already cast yourself as the interesting one.

Context matters. As a late-19th-century journalist and satirist, Bierce lived inside a booming public sphere of speeches, lectures, parlor debates, and print commentary - an era addicted to opinion. The Devil’s Dictionary thrives on the suspicion that genteel manners are masks for selfishness, and this entry is a scalpel to that culture’s polite pretense. It’s also a proto-critique of today’s attention economy: the bore is whoever fails to read the room, which often means whoever fails to validate your preferred version of yourself. Bierce isn’t defending better conversation; he’s mocking the ego behind the complaint.