Daily Inspiration Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce doesn’t offer consolation; he offers a trapdoor. “The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up” reads like stoic wisdom until you feel the sabotage in its gears. Bierce, the journalist-turned-professional cynic, is staging a mock sermon: the rhythm is maxim-like, almost biblical, but the content is a dare to self-denial so extreme it collapses into absurdity. That’s the point. He’s parodying the moral economies that treat pleasure as debt and virtue as a kind of public performance.

The line works because it weaponizes repetition. “Best” appears twice, turning abundance into a burden: if the “best things” are truly best, then relinquishing them becomes the ultimate proof of character. Bierce exposes how easily lofty ideals can be used to police desire, especially in a culture that romanticizes sacrifice. The subtext is not “renounce attachment”; it’s “notice how moral language can be engineered to make you grateful for loss.”

Context matters: Bierce wrote in the long shadow of the Civil War and the Gilded Age, when grand rhetoric about honor, duty, and refinement often papered over brutality, greed, and broken bodies. As a journalist, he watched public language get laundered into uplift. This aphorism feels like a small, elegant act of counter-reporting. If the “best things” keep slipping away - youth, love, security - society will tell you to call it a choice. Bierce replies: fine, let’s follow that logic to its bleak conclusion and see how ridiculous it sounds.