Resemblance to Ourselves — Bierce Devil's Dictionary T-Shirt

Bierce wrote this for The Devil's Dictionary between 1881 and 1906. He defined admiration as a mirror. He wasn't wrong.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1906)

"ADMIRATION, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves."

Bierce compiled thirty years of newspaper-column entries into The Devil's Dictionary — a book he'd been writing, a definition at a time, since 1875. Each entry was a small trap: you walked in thinking it was about the word, and walked out realizing it was about you. The ADMIRATION entry is the trap at its best. You've done it — admired someone who thinks like you, reads what you read, agrees with what you already believe, and called it taste. The "polite" part is the kicker: Bierce isn't accusing you of anything crude. He's noting that self-admiration has very good manners.

The Design

The dictionary-entry format does what the definition does: it arrives as objective record and lands as personal verdict. ADMIRATION, n. at the top — formal, authoritative — and then the definition underneath delivers the ambush. The gold rule between definition and attribution is the pause where you realize you're in it.

Also in the Devil's Dictionary set: Nowhere to Nothing, Bad Company, Top of One's Voice, and When You Wish Him to Listen.

About This Tee

• 100% combed and ring-spun cotton
• Fabric weight: 4.2 oz/yd² (142 g/m²)
• Retail fit, true to size
• Side-seamed construction
• Machine washable, cold water
• Quoteiac logo on the left sleeve

Who It's For

• The self-aware reader who finds Bierce funnier the more honest they're being
• Anyone who's described someone as brilliant right after they agreed with something you said
• The one who can laugh at the mirror — who's caught themselves praising themselves through someone else

Wear the recognition.

Ambrose Bierce, in Plain English

• Lived: 1842–1914(?), Ohio-born, San Francisco-made
• Fought in some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War — Shiloh, Chickamauga — and never stopped writing about what he saw there
• Spent thirty years as a newspaper columnist in San Francisco, where he was known as "Bitter Bierce" and feared by politicians, frauds, and sentimentalists alike
• Disappeared into Mexico in 1913, age 71, and was never found — the most fittingly strange exit in American literary history
• The Devil's Dictionary was published in pieces over decades before it became a book in 1906 — each entry a surgical strike on self-deception