Daily Inspiration Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Prayer gets gutted here not with a theorem but with a sneer. Bierce takes a word soaked in reverence and rewrites it in the cold, bureaucratic language of petitions and statutes: "laws of the universe", "annulled", "single petitioner". The joke lands because it treats the cosmos like a courthouse and the supplicant like a plaintiff filing paperwork against gravity. It is funny in the way a guillotine is efficient: the sentence doesn`t argue with faith, it reclassifies it as an absurd kind of self-importance.

The subtext is less "God doesn`t exist" than "human beings cannot resist making themselves the center of any system they claim to honor". "Confessedly unworthy" is the twist of the knife. Even the believer admits moral insufficiency, Bierce notes, yet still feels entitled to special exemptions. The humor is not gentle; it is aimed at the psychological bargain embedded in much piety: humility performed as a preface to a request for preferential treatment.

Context matters. Bierce`s The Devil`s Dictionary was forged in the late-19th-century American stew of Gilded Age hypocrisy, boosterish certainty, and public religiosity. As a journalist and veteran with a famously scorched worldview, he watched institutions sell virtue while practicing power. This definition reads like a dispatch from someone who has seen too many sermons bless too many earthly agendas.

What makes it work is its precision. It doesn`t rant about superstition; it exposes the transactional logic hiding inside sanctity, turning prayer into a cosmic customer-service call where the caller already knows they don`t deserve a refund.