Daily Inspiration Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Meekness gets sold as a moral virtue, a kind of spiritual low profile. Bierce flips it into a tactical posture: not gentleness, but delay. In his hands, “uncommon patience” is the giveaway. The meek aren’t incapable of striking back; they’re disciplined enough to wait until retaliation pays interest. That’s the sting of The Devil’s Dictionary style: he doesn’t merely mock a word, he exposes the social bargain hidden inside it.

The subtext is a critique of how power reads behavior. Meekness, in public life, often functions as camouflage. It reassures superiors, disarms rivals, lowers expectations. Bierce suggests that what looks like humility may be calculation - a long game played by people who understand that premature outrage is wasteful. The phrase “worth while” finishes the joke with a moral shrug: revenge isn’t condemned here, it’s optimized. Virtue becomes efficiency.

Context matters. Bierce wrote as a journalist with a veteran’s jaundiced eye, shaped by the Civil War and by Gilded Age hypocrisy, when piety and propriety were frequently performance. His cynicism targets the era’s self-congratulating language: the way society praises restraint, not because it’s holy, but because it’s convenient for those in charge. Bierce’s definition lands because it’s plausible. We’ve all met “meek” people whose silence feels less like sainthood than like a file being kept.