Daily Inspiration Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce’s definition doesn’t just mock fear; it mocks the moral theater we build around fear. “Thinks with his legs” is a neat piece of verbal sabotage: it yanks “cowardice” out of the grand arena of character and drops it into the body, where instinct outruns principle. The line works because it treats flight as a kind of reasoning, an embarrassing downgrade from mind to muscle. Running isn’t framed as an act; it’s framed as a philosophy executed by calves.

The subtext is classic Bierce: contempt for sanctimony and for the way societies hand out medals of virtue after the smoke clears. In a “perilous emergency,” everyone is improvising. Bierce’s joke is that the so-called coward is merely the person whose improvisation is too honest to be romantic. The insult hinges on a cultural expectation - that bravery is the default “proper” response - and then punctures it by implying that the body, not the soul, is calling the shots.

Context matters: Bierce wrote with the sour authority of a Civil War veteran and the professional suspicion of a journalist. The Devil’s Dictionary is essentially a glossary of American self-deception, published in an era that lionized martial valor and public rectitude. His cynicism isn’t casual; it’s a worldview shaped by watching noble rhetoric get people killed. By reducing cowardice to biomechanics, Bierce exposes how thin our heroic categories can be when the emergency is real and the exit is visible.