Daily Inspiration Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce turns nostalgia into an accusation. Infancy, in his framing, isn’t simply a time of innocence; it’s a time when reality still feels enchanted, when the ordinary arrives haloed. “Heaven lies about us” nods to the Romantic idea that children carry some prelapsarian glow, but Bierce can’t resist twisting the knife: the next line flips the verb from metaphor to indictment. The world “begins lying about us” suggests that whatever “heaven” was, it’s quickly replaced by human institutions that actively manufacture illusion.

The specific intent is classic Bierce: puncture comforting narratives by showing how they’re built. He’s not arguing that adulthood is sad because magic disappears; he’s arguing that adulthood is sad because we’re trained into a permanent misunderstanding of ourselves. The subtext is about socialization as a con. Family, school, church, nation, workplace: each supplies scripts about virtue, success, respectability, even happiness, and each depends on the child becoming legible and compliant. If infancy is “heaven,” it’s not because it’s morally pure; it’s because it’s not yet fully enrolled.

Context matters. Bierce came out of the Civil War and into the Gilded Age, a period that sold progress while grinding people up with industrial cruelty, boosterism, and pious rhetoric. As a journalist and satirist, he specialized in exposing the gap between public language and private reality. The line works because it compresses an entire worldview into one bitter pivot: wonder isn’t lost; it’s overwritten.