"Cynic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... am disappointed in you," Bertha said, half in jest, half in earnest. "You are not at all the person I thought you were. Whatever I may have fancied about you, I never imagined you a cynic or ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... long ere we arrived at the place of destination. Of course nothing could be said in my defence. Hanging was my inevitable fate. I resigned myself thereto with a feeling half stupid, half acrimonious. Being little of a cynic, I had all the sentiments of a dog. The hangman, however, adjusted the noose about my ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... better in the Middle Ages. For the Greeks and Romans contented themselves with mocking at rich people, and constructing merry dialogues between Charon and Diogenes or Menippus, in which the ferryman and the cynic rejoiced together as they saw kings and rich men coming down to the shore of Acheron, in lamenting and lamentable crowds, casting their crowns into the dark waters, and searching, sometimes in vain, for the last ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... slave into the foundations of their palace. It was with his own life that my companion disarmed the envy of the gods. He fought his paper single-handed; trusting no one, for he was something of a cynic; up early and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily earwigging influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation. In that slender and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of courage, that he should thus have died at his employment; ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not difficult (especially when we know the result) to guess at the canons of taste which will pass muster in such regions. Enthusiastical politicians of recent days have been much given to denouncing modern clubs, where everybody is a cynic and unable to appreciate the great ideas which stir the masses. It may be so; my own acquaintance with club life, though not very extensive, does not convince me that every member of a London club is a Mephistopheles; but I will admit that ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... from the stoae, or porticos; the Peripatetics imparted their ambulatory instructions under the plane-trees of the Lyceum—and Plato reasoned in the Academy, which he held with his school, and into which no ungeometrical mind was to enter. And though some dog of a Cynic might despise the union of the ornamental with the useful, and claim austerity as the rule of life, yet to the great body of the social Greek people the gymnasium offered all those attractions which boulevards, cafes, and jardins-chantants do now to the Gallic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... visit he used to come often and entertain me with the news and gossip of the town. I have never met a more interesting man. He was an onlooker of life rather than an actor, an ironical cynic, chuckling with sardonic humour. The secret of his charm lay perhaps in a certain whimsical outlook and in an original turn ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... Anderson, "we must get on. You rest if you like though; there isn't anybody waiting for you; but Mabel, she 's waiting for me and I must try and get back. She would be disappointed else. Grieve! of course she'll grieve if I'm lost. All the world isn't a cynic like you." ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... great reliance on the Pleasures of Memory. But, if pearls and bright shells be rarely found there, surely waifs, better than echini and sting-rays, are to be gathered on the "shores of long ago." Ah, cynic! you are strong enough to be merciful—just this once. Spare us the string of examples that would overwhelm us utterly. Does it not suffice that we confess the truth of that saddest adage, tolled in our ears by ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... was great and free does keep, That is our home!... Mild thoughts of man's ungentle race 5 Shall our contented exile reap; For who that in some happy place His own free thoughts can freely chase By woods and waves can clothe his face In cynic smiles? Child! we ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the house there fell upon him—alas! what a thing it is to be a coward—a new fear. The fear was not the fear of Basterga, the bully and cynic, whom he had known and fawned on and flattered; but of Basterga the dark and dangerous conspirator, of whom he now heard, ready to repay with the dagger the least attempt to penetrate his secrets! On his entrance he had flung himself face downward on his pallet in ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... Cynic views asked Epictetus, what sort of person a true Cynic should be, requesting a general sketch of the system, he answered:—"We will consider that at leisure. At present I content myself with saying this much: If a man ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... sermon, though the sermon is a humorous one, of the non-existence of immorality. Perhaps; but Punch does not aspire to reflect the savagery we call civilisation by painting a Hogarthian "Progress," nor to preach virtue by depicting vice. It is no doubt very appalling and amusing to hear a young girl-cynic say, as she points to a hideous monkey in a zoological gardens—"He only wants a little money to be just like a man!" Ca donne a penser; but Punch prefers wholesome jests to irony and repellent cynicism, and is content to leave his impeachment in the hands of his ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... "You're a cynic, woman," Jim said, kissing his wife, who by this time had come around to his chair. "It's all too easy for you, that's the trouble! They've accepted you with open arms; you're the rage! You ought to have been kept for a while on the anxious seat, like the poor Groves, and Mrs. McCann; then you'd ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... I expect a cynic and a misogynist to understand the simple fervour of an inexperienced soul—Oh! drat it all, Quatermain, stop your acid chaff and tell me what is to be done. Really I ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... become cloud-capt, was a tender and lowly plant. They made themselves like a youngish aunt and uncle to him, and had him with them all they could while they stayed in Paris. When they came home they brought the first impressionistic pictures ever seen in the West; at Pymantoning, the village cynic asked which was right side up, and whether he was to stand on his head or not to get them in range. Ludlow remained in France, which he maintained had the only sun for impressionism; and then he changed his mind all at once, and under an impulse ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... I think, will strike. The fashion, you know, now, is to do away with old prejudices, and to rescue certain characters from the illiberal odium with which custom has marked them. Thus we have a generous Israelite, an amiable cynic, and so on. Now, Sir, I call ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... here he encountered Austria, as he now encounters France. But in that larger unity where nations will be conjoined in harmony he can do less, so long at least as he continues a fanatic for kings and a cynic towards popular institutions. ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... through the shift of mood and mood, Mine ancient humour saves him whole— The cynic devil in his blood That bids him mock his ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... Tim. What a man Tim was, and how blind I had been and selfish! He stood before me tall and strong, watching me with his quiet eyes, and as I looked at him I thought of Weston, the lanky cynic, with his thin, homely face and loose-jointed, shambling walk. Then I wondered at it all. Then I said to ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... gun" is a worthy old phrase That doesn't quite seem to apply in our days; And that man is a cynic, or talking in fun, Who says he's "as sure as an 'African' gun." The Birmingham gun-makers loudly protest That their products are good, if they're not quite the best. Mr. Punch with the Brummagem boys will not quarrel, But all guns should be trustworthy, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... century's toiling and preaching—would enlarge on Doctor Dowbiggin's cordiality, and the marked courtesy of the clerk, and when they were alone in the manse, his wife would kiss him—incredible to our cynic—and say, "You see, Tom, more people than I know what a good work you are doing," and Tom would start his twenty-first lecture on the Ephesians next morning with new spirit. Such is the power of comradeship, such is the thirst for sympathy; and indeed there is no ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... with suspicious alacrity. "Oh, love, love, love!" crooned Peter. "Oh, love, love, love!" Oliver flushed. "Don't swipe all my butter, you simple cynic!" He knew ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... with a perfect placidity. "Suppose he is a tyrant—he is still a check on a hundred tyrants. Suppose he is a cynic, it is to his interest to govern well. Suppose he is a criminal—by removing poverty and substituting power, we put a check on his criminality. In short, by substituting despotism we have put a total check on one criminal and a partial ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... sort of avuncular indulgence about his attitude; what he called his "preaching" was at worst a sort of grumbling, ending with the sentiment that boys will be boys and that there's nothing new under the sun. He was not really either a cynic or a censor morum; but (in another sense than Chaucer's) a gentle pardoner: having seen the weaknesses he is sometimes almost weak about them. He really comes nearer to exculpating Pendennis or Ethel Newcome than any other author, who saw ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... which seems to have much to commend it. But it has at the best serious limitations, and at the worst it may issue in a tragedy. The wrong knight may be unhorsed. The award may go to him of the black plume. Pitting one experience against another has gone to the making of many a cynic and not a few despairing souls. The compensative interpretation of joy and sorrow may bring an answer of peace to a man's soul, or it may not. But in this matter we are dealing with things in which we cannot afford to risk an equivocal or a despairing answer. We must win in every ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... rosary, but more to my dress and my acquaintance with the dialect of the natives. I have always carried with me a peasant as a guide, who has been intrusted with the small sums of money I wanted for my immediate purposes, and my baggage has been little more than a Cynic philosopher would have carried with him; and when I have been unable to walk, I have trusted myself to the conduct of a vetturino, a native of the province, with his single ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... courteous, and to the bold, free, conscienceless child of nature whose favour he buys, and with whom, after all his barren metaphysics, he departs, only to attain, when his brief spell of foolish freedom is over, loneliness and cynic satiety. It may amuse us to circle with him through his arguments, though every one knows he will yield at last and that yielding is more honest than his talk; but what we ask is—Was the matter worth the trouble of more than two thousand lines of long-winded verse? ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... you are! Listen to me—it is savage to fight—you must excuse me, but it is abominable. Yet, I must tell you, in this case you made a happy selection. You have thrashed a rake, a cynic, a parasite—a man who robbed his nephews ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... mute and downcast. This personal development came as a complete surprise to her. Pride would not permit her to plead her own cause. Dubois glanced at her covertly. He was still annoyed and defiant; but even he, hardened scoundrel and cynic though he was, could not find ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... discover their misery, to look deeply into the lives of his fellow creatures, below the platitudes and conventionalities. He is richly endowed with the divine gift of sympathy, the supreme art of discrimination, yet occasionally reveals the witty spirits of the cynic, ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... know it, my lad. La Rochefoucauld said that there are convenient marriages, but no delightful ones. You don't know the comfort of seeing through and through a thundering liar and rotten cynic like that fellow. Ha, ha! Now off with you to the park, and write your poem. Half past one, sharp, mind: we never ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... mercifulness, and peaceableness are indeed the marks of Christ's teaching. But as Christ conceived them they were not passive qualities, but intensely active energies of the soul. It has been well remarked that[14] there was a poverty of spirit in the creed of the cynic centuries before Christianity. There was a meekness in the doctrine of the Stoic long before the advent of Jesus. But these tenets were very far from being anticipations of Christ's morality. Cynic poverty of spirit was but the poor-spiritedness of ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... cynic—write nonsense and fiction On champagne and velvet, on satin and sin; Though the joke may be able, 'tis false as a fable, And shows what a fog Fleet-street sometimes ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... said that Solomon and Job have best spoken of the misery of man, the former the most fortunate, the latter the most unfortunate of creatures. And yet it seems strange to me that John Benham, the millionaire, Jerry's father, cynic and misogynist, and Roger Canby, bookworm and pauper, should each have arrived, through different mental processes, at the same ideal and philosophy of life. We both disliked women, not only disliked but feared and distrusted them, seeing in ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... . Has she not matured? might it not have "done," after all? The nosegay was not so insipid! . . . But suddenly, while she mocks, the deeper "truth of that" invades her soul, and she must cease from cynic gibes, and yield the word ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... activity is less imperative in adult life; so that the ideal element in connection with the ordinary excretions is almost a negligible quantity. The evacuation theory of the sexual instinct is, however, that which has most popular vogue, and the cynic delights to express it in crude language. It is the view that appeals to the criminal mind, and in the slang of French criminals the brothel is le cloaque. It was also the view implicitly accepted by medieval ascetic ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... our comfortable tradition and sure faith. Would he not betray himself an alien cynic who should otherwise portray Main Street, or distress the citizens by speculating whether there may not be ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... spoil her, Arnold. Don't you know, you old cynic, that women can't stand such flattery as yours?" ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... having a small appetite; but to a man who has seen the world, and drunk deeply of the wine of life, there is nothing half so sweet in the whole of his existence as a good dinner. "A hard heart and a good digestion will make any man happy." So said Talleyrand, a cynic if you like, but a man who knew the temper of his day and generation. Ovid wrote about the art of love—Brillat Savarin, of the art of dining; yet, I warrant you, the gastronomical treatise of the brilliant Frenchman is more ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... with him I felt how much I wished I could be a Catholic in Catholic countries, and a Protestant in Protestant ones. Surely there are some things which like politics are too serious to be taken quite seriously. Surtout point de zele is not the saying of a cynic, but the conclusion of a sensible man; and the more deep our feeling is about any matter, the more occasion have we to be on our guard against zele in this particular respect. There is but one step from the "earnest" ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... which their view is based are facts which he either does not know or habitually ignores. Yet the view from the outside is just as true as the view from the inside. Both are necessary to the complete truth; and the Socialist, who emphasizes the outside view, is not a cynic, but merely the friend of the wage-earners, maddened by the spectacle of the needless misery which capitalism ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... could bring back to him the nature which had been his before the bitterness of betrayal changed him to a misanthropical cynic. His hatred of women was not appeased by the revenge he had on the Lambtons and O'Guires. He would not employ a woman; he would not employ a man who was married; he would not tolerate the presence of a woman on any of his properties. However valuable a man might be to him ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... was that he knew nothing about books, and was one of those jeering cynics who are so common under one guise or another. Fine cynics are endurable, and give a certain zest often to society, which might become too civil without them; but your coarse cynic is not pleasant. Mr. Copperhead's eye was as effectual in quenching emotion of any but the coarsest kind as water is against fire. People might be angry in his presence—it was the only passion he comprehended; but tenderness, sympathy, sorrow, all the more generous sentiments, fled and ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... curtseying of buxom, neat-capped maids; such beaming obeisances from mine host, all to welcome "Mr. Anthony": indeed such a reception as might have warmed the heart of any man save your embittered, cold-hearted cynic or one who rode ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... of Stoic philosophy, born at Citium, in Cyprus, son of a merchant and bred to merchandise, but losing all in a shipwreck gave himself up to the study of philosophy; went to Athens, and after posing as a cynic at length opened a school of his own in the Stoa, where he taught to extreme old age a gospel called Stoicism, which, at the decline of the heathen world, proved the stay of many a noble soul that but for it would have died ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... A Necromantic Experiment." Translated by H. W. and F. G. Fowler. Menippus was a Cynic philosopher, originally a slave, born in Syria. He lived about 60 B.C., and wrote much, but all his works have ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... now! The captious cynic at the contrast sneers, Punch believes in, and would help, the Progress of the Years. When his Century's full course, fifty Years hence, has run, With good heart and glad may ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 18, 1891 • Various
... ambitions, and immortal fires, Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave. But stay! no age was e'er degenerate, Unless men held it at too cheap a rate, For in our likeness still we shape our fate. 90 Ah, there is something here Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer, Something that gives our feeble light A high immunity from Night, Something that leaps life's narrow bars To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven; A seed of sunshine that can leaven Our earthly dullness with the beams of stars, And glorify our clay With light from fountains elder ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... conception of happiness in life is more intelligible if we contrast it with his father's. The Cynic element in James Mill, as his son now tells us (pg. 48), was that he had scarcely any belief in pleasures; he thought few of them worth the price which has to be paid for them; and he set down the greater number of the miscarriages in life as due to an excessive ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... calmest man within the radius of a mile; for the insignificant little street was in an uproar. There was a barricade at each end of it. Such a barricade as Parisians love. It was composed of a few overturned omnibuses; for the true Parisian is a cynic. He likes overturned things, and he loves to see objects of peace converted to purposes of war. He is not content that ploughshares be beaten into swords. He prefers altar-rails. And so this little street was blocked at either end by a barricade of overturned omnibuses, of old ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... "Cynic! The thought seems to please you! You want to see me discomfited and defeated. Very well; you can drop me right here if you like, but I'll wager something handsome that you'll regret your skepticism all the rest of your days. Resistance to the course of events marked by ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... a possible strain of Phoenician blood in him (for the Phoenicians were no philosophers), yet it is quite likely that through Asia Minor he may have come in touch with the Far East. He studied under the cynic Crates, but he did not neglect other philosophical systems. After many years' study he opened his own school in a colonnade in Athens called the Painted Porch, or Stoa, which gave the Stoics their name. Next to Zeno, the School of the Porch ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... and conversation afford this cynic constant food for observation; and he has delivered himself oracularly at various stages of the study: but I cannot say that his observations, taken as a whole, present that consistency which entitles them to be regarded as a body ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... street. It's a state of mind. We should all be charitable—surely all men are agreed on that! We should think weel of others, and believe, sae lang as they wull let us, that they mean to do what's right and kind. We should not be bitter and suspicious and cynical. God hates a cynic. ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... the cynic said, "this sinning, suffering world would break my heart." But what if God's heart was broken? Do we not read in the 69th Psalm, "Reproach hath broken my heart? [Footnote: Ps. lxix. 20.]" The last night before He died He went to the garden of Gethsemane. Only three of His disciples followed ...
— The One Great Reality • Louisa Clayton
... ready for anything that an absolute prince could desire, like Bishops Bernier and De Pancemont, one accepting a reward of 30,000 francs and the other the sum of 50,000 francs[51105] for the vile part they have played in the negotiations for the Concordat; a miserly, brutal cynic like Maury, archbishop of Paris, or an intriguing, mercenary skeptic like De Pradt, archbishop of Malines; or an old imbecile, falling on his knees before the civil power, like Rousseau, bishop of Orleans, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... incapable of truth. In private life a girl of this description embroils the peace of families, walks attended by a troop of scowling swains, and passes, once at least, through the divorce court; it is a common and, except to the cynic, an uninteresting type. On the throne, however, and in the hands of a man like Gondremark, she may become the authoress of serious ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The cynic is ever ready to say that the tyrant living within a man declares only for those things which represent great sacrifice of time and effort on the part of other men. Perhaps it is true, and that therein lies the ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... not a cynic; he is only wise because he is Life and He is death, the creator and ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... again. The sexton took his shovel, but on account of the frost, he was only able to detach large lumps of earth, which beat a fine tune down below, a regular bombardment of the coffin, an enfilade of artillery sufficient to make one think the wood was splitting. One may be a cynic; nevertheless that sort of music soon upsets one's stomach. The weeping recommenced. They moved off, they even got outside, but they still heard the detonations. My-Boots, blowing on his ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... remembered how merrily Lapidoth had pinned his dropped-off sleeve to the back of his coat, crying, "Don't I look like a Schlachziz (nobleman)?" and how he in return had vaunted the superiority of his gaping shoes: "They don't squeeze at the toes." How they had played the cynic, he and the grave-digger's son-in-law, turning up with remorseless spade the hollow bones of human virtue! As convincedly as synagogue-elders sought during fatal epidemics for the secret sins ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... member was side-splitting on the subject of Christmas Waits; our social reformer bitter upon Christmas drunkenness; our economist indignant upon Christmas charities. Only one argument of any weight with us was advanced in favour of the festival, and that was our leading cynic's suggestion that it was worth enduring the miseries of Christmas, to enjoy the soul-satisfying comfort of the after reflection that it was all over, and could not occur again ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... jubilant himself, though, boylike, he tried to play the cynic; and when the ramshackle fly drove through the picturesque village, and they came in sight of a huge palace of a house which gleamed redly through the trees of an English park, and the flyman, pointing with his whip, informed them that it was Anglemere, ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... with which they heard on Sundays the reading of the second lesson. But as the stage-talk went on, the slave-maidens announcing themselves without delay comfortably modern and commonplace, and Pilate a cynic and a decadent, though as distinctively from Melbourne, it was possible to note the breaking up of this sentiment. It was plain, after all, that no standard of ideality was to be maintained or struggled after. The ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Jerusalemitish plebeian-maker[216] will learn what a fine return he has made to my brilliant speeches, of which you may expect a splendid recantation. For, as well as I can guess, if that profligate is in favour with our tyrants, he will be able to crow not only over the "cynic consular,"[217] but over your Tritons of the fish-ponds also.[218] For I shall not possibly be an object of anybody's jealousy when robbed of power and of my influence in the senate. If, on the other hand, he should quarrel with them, it will not suit his purpose to attack me. However, let him attack. ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... sometimes to a cynic that there go two words to a bargain. In the convent of St. Sebastian all was gratitude; gratitude (as aforesaid) to the hidalgo from all the convent for his present, until at last the hidalgo began to express gratitude to them for their gratitude to him. Then came a rolling ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... "Remember this: I didn't marry you because I thought you were a cynic. Now Walter as a ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... would seek for it among the choice representatives of the class in question,—ay, and find it, too. Nor would the ardor of search be chilled by the suggestion of scarcity conveyed in the practical sarcasm of the sly old cynic, when he scorched human nature with a horn lantern by instituting a search with it on the sun-bright highways for an unauthenticated type of man. And yet the rowdy, like many another ugly and repulsive thing, may have his use. In the East Indies, it ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... pleasant tales Of bonnes fortunes! Here a quaint cynic rails, There an enthusiast gushes. Gay talk flows on, not in a rolling stream, But with the brooklet's intermittent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... warrants me in expecting every possible assistance: of these Dr. Wight is already well known, and others are rising rapidly to fill, I hope, the highest Botanical stations when these shall have been vacated by the leviathans who now occupy them. Let not the cynic accuse me of partiality when I mention the names of William Valentine, of Decaisne, and C. ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... who followed the so-called Stoic system made themselves prominent, among whom was Demetrius the cynic. These men, abusing the title of philosophy, kept teaching their disciples publicly many pernicious doctrines, and in this way were gradually corrupting [Footnote: Reading [Greek: hypodiephtheiron] (Dindorf).] some. Under these circumstances Mucianus, influenced more by anger than by fondness for ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... impatient—it's a symphony concert, and I must go—the horrid little cynic!—I half believe she suspects that I'm writing to you and tearing off yards of sentiment. It is likely I'd do that, isn't it!—but I don't care what she thinks. Besides, it behooves her to be agreeable, and she knows that I ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... small weight attaching to true worth unsupported by personal charm, I am tempted to turn cynic." ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... Of Maria Edgeworth, the woman, one cannot easily say too much in praise. That home life, so loving, so wise, and so helpful, was beautiful to its end. Miss Zimmern has treated it with delicate appreciation. Her book is refined in conception and tasteful in execution,—all, in short, the cynic might say, that we expect a woman's book to ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... be almost sad if neither can write a book to live—as, of course, neither has done as yet. Mr. Kipling is the more audacious, which is probably a matter of training. He was brought up in India, where one's beard grows much quicker than at Oxford, and where you not only become a man (and a cynic) in a hurry, but see and hear strange things (and print them) such as the youth of Oxford miss, or, becoming acquainted with, would not dare insert in the local magazine of the moment. So Mr. Kipling's first work betokened a knowledge of the world that is by no means to ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... as he always is contented when he can make satisfactory arrangements to sacrifice himself unselfishly and pretend to himself he is a cynic. Whether because the armed guard of their own people put new courage in them, or because rifles at their rear made them more afraid, the stragglers gave less trouble for the next few hours. Perhaps they were growing ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... at the age when the forces of character still lie dormant, and an accident may determine the direction of their future development. It is the age when it is possible for fortune to make a dare-devil of a philosopher, a sceptic of a worshipper, a cynic of a sentimentalist. ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... that Isabel was not sure whether he was angry or amused. Nor was Lawrence. She had struck out of his male vanity a resentment so crude that he was ashamed of it, ashamed or even shocked? He was not readily shocked. A pure cynic, he let into his mind, on an easy footing, primitive desires that the average man admits only behind a screen. Yet when these libertine fancies played over Isabel's innocent head they were distasteful to him: as he remembered once, in a Barbizon ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... canting Roundhead had regarded with reverence was insulted. Whatever he had proscribed was favoured. Because he had been scrupulous about trifles, all scruples were treated with derision. Because he had covered his failings with the mask of devotion, men were encouraged to obtrude with Cynic impudence all their most scandalous vices on the public eye. Because he had punished illicit love with barbarous severity, virgin purity and conjugal fidelity were made a jest. To that sanctimonious jargon which was his Shibboleth, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the same disease as Pigasov's,' observed Rudin, 'the desire of being original. One affects to be a Mephistopheles—the other a cynic. In all that, there is much egoism, much vanity, but little truth, little love. Indeed, there is even calculation of a sort in it. A man puts on a mask of indifference and indolence so that some one will be ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... surrender of Yorktown years after, upon the brilliant combination which had resulted in the capture of the army, he added these words: "But, after all, your excellency's achievements in the Jerseys were such that nothing could surpass them!" And the witty and wise old cynic, Mr. Horace Walpole, with his usual discrimination, wrote to a friend, Sir Horace Mann, when he heard of the affair at Trenton, the night march to Princeton, and the successful attack there: "Washington, the dictator, has shown himself both a Fabius and a Camillus. His ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... hundred-faced and hydra-headed prodigy, at once defies and derides all definitive comment. This however we may surely and confidently say of it, that of all Shakespeare's offspring it is the one whose best things lose least by extraction and separation from their context. That some cynic had lately bitten him by the brain—and possibly a cynic himself in a nearly rabid stage of anthropophobia—we might conclude as reasonably from consideration of the whole as from examination of the parts more especially and virulently affected: yet how much is here also ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... to be very much of a cynic in these matters; I mean that it is impossible to believe in the permanence of man's or woman's love. Or, at any rate, it is impossible to believe in the permanence of any early passion. As I see it, at least, with regard to man, a love affair, a love for any definite woman—is something in the ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... d'Aintrigues, 'the young Languedocian gentleman,' with perhaps Chamfort the Cynic to help him, rises into furor almost Pythic; highest, where many are high. (Memoire sur les Etats-Generaux. See Montgaillard, i. 457-9.) Foolish young Languedocian gentleman; who himself so soon, 'emigrating among the foremost,' ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Israelites of old, they succeed at length in escaping from the hands of oppression and tyranny, but only to wander in a desert land throughout the length of their days. This is the region where dwell the pessimist, the skeptic and the cynic—miserable mortals that have wasted on creatures the talents they should have given to their Creator, or that have otherwise failed in their conception of life, and have left unmultiplied the money of the Master.(92) There is plainly no middle course for us, if we would not encounter disaster; ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... he. "'Tis a combination I have noticed before. I wonder will some astute perfumer ever seize the idea? It would have its guilty appeal for our sex—perchance for t'other; though I'm no cynic like ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... very obviously rich, at any rate for this night, had some of the best attendance in the restaurant. Several waiters had been told off specially to look after them, the least and busiest of whom was little more than a boy—a slender pale boy, who was working very hard to give satisfaction. The cynic might think—and say, for cynics always say what they think—that this zeal was the result of his youth; but the cynic for once would be only partly right. The zeal also had sartorial springs, this eventful day being the first on which the boy had been promoted to full waiter-hood, and the first ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... Never at all good-looking though certainly not ugly, she had been afraid of the effect of her wealth upon men. And because she was so rich she had never chosen to marry. She was possibly too much of a cynic, but she had always preserved her personal dignity. No one had ever legitimately laughed at her, and no one had ever had the chance of contemptuously pitying her. She must have missed a great deal, but now in middle-age she was surround ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... profession, to leave the conduct of the cigarette entirely to the actor, you will find it much more satisfactory to insert in the stage directions the particular movements (with match and so forth) that you wish carried out. Let us assume that Lord Arthur asks Lord John what a cynic is—the question of what a cynic is having arisen quite naturally in the course of the plot. Let us assume further that you wish Lord John to reply, "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... Tina is a cynic," remarked Dr. Theophilus, smiling, "and I don't doubt that she has her excellent reasons, as usual; most cynics have. A woman, however, has got to believe in love to the point of lunacy or become a scoffer. What I contend, now, is that love ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... Miser. Oh dear me! I desired to shape a Democratic Budget! But I fear 'twill be a fizzle, howsoe'er I fake and fudge it! Second E. M. Don't talk like that, my H-RC-T, for such cynic slang is shocking! But—the Revenue Returns, no doubt, our dearest hopes are mocking. First E. M. Oh, I know you ape the casuist, and love the pleonastic, But how tackle our taxation in a manner really drastic With a Revenue declining! From the task my ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... transl. by Yonge, p. 226. Diogenes the Cynic evidently had Thales in his mind when he said "that mathematicians kept their eyes fixed on the sun and moon, and overlooked what was under ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... to man if man, instead of straining his brains and enlisting the services of technical arts for exploiting air, land and water, grazed like cattle, or like monkeys indulged his sexual impulses with cynic shamelessness,—in short, if he reverted to the monkey order. In passing be it observed that the fact that, besides man, monkeys are the only beings with whom the sexual impulse is not fixed to certain ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... been said of Thackeray that he was a cynic. This has been said so generally, that the charge against him has become proverbial. This, stated barely, leaves one of two impressions on the mind, or perhaps the two together,—that this cynicism was natural to his character ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... place Beyond their customary bounds, And meet with others, curs or hounds, Imagine what a holiday! The native dogs, whose interests centre In one great organ, term'd the venter, The strangers rush at, bite, and bay; With cynic pertness tease and worry, And chase them off their territory. So, too, do men. Wealth, grandeur, glory, To men of office or profession, Of every sort, in every nation, As tempting are, and sweet, As is to dogs the refuse meat. With us, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... speculum of a telescope, it may be some time before we have done with what Guillemin calls "the interesting, almost insoluble question, of the existence of living and organized beings on the surface of the satellite of our little earth." [425] Some cynic may ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... fine and vigorous colony. Some will see in its record of early struggles, difficulties and mistakes endured, paid for and surmounted, a signal instance of the overruling care of Providence. To the cynic the tale must be merely a minor portion of the "supreme ironic procession with laughter of gods in the background." To the writer it seems, at least, to give a very notable proof of the collective ability of a colonizing race to overcome obstacles ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... extremes, and as he thought of his ardent words and tones, of his ready acceptance of Esteban's good faith, of his description of Christina, he fell to wondering whether so sudden and violent a conversion from passionate cynic to passionate believer would not lack permanence. There was that little instructive accident of the dropped fan. Even in the moment of conversion so small a thing had almost sufficed ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... with me, a rule which I have never lost sight of, however imperfectly I have carried it out: Try to know enough of a wide range of subjects to profit by the conversation of intelligent persons of different callings and various intellectual gifts and acquisitions. The cynic will paraphrase this into a shorter formula: Get a smattering in every sort of knowledge. I must therefore add a second piece of advice: Learn to hold as of small account the comments of the cynic. He is often amusing, sometimes really witty, occasionally, ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of virtue, self-control, abnegation. She fasted till two o'clock on the Great White Fast when she was seven years old and accomplished the perfect feat at nine. When she read a simple little story in a prize-book, inculcating the homely moralities at which the cynic sneers, her eyes filled with tears and her breast with unselfish and dutiful determinations. She had something of the temperament of the stoic, fortified by that spiritual pride which does not look for equal goodness in others; and though she disapproved ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... (young) pup, puppy, whelp; (female) bitch, slut; cur, whippet, tike, fice, mongrel. Associated Words: canine, Canis, cyniatrics, rabies, hydrophobia, cynanthropy, cynegetics, cynic, cynophobia, cynoid, cynopodous, cynocephalous, cynocephalus, cynocephalic, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the host of sayings, true, false, trivial, profound, which are scattered over the pages of Helvetius, is one subtle and far-reaching sentence, which made a strong impression upon Bentham. "In order to love mankind," he writes, "we must expect little from them." This might, on the lips of a cynic, serve for a formula of that kind of misanthropy which is not more unamiable than it is unscientific. But in the mouth of Helvetius it was a plea for considerateness, for indulgence, and, above all, it was meant for an inducement to patience and sustained ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... the noise of a brawl.—There was that in the Admiral that would have when it could outward no less than inward magnificence. He could go like a Spartan or Diogenes the Cynic, but when the chance came—magnificence! With him from Spain traveled a Viceroy's household. He had no less than thirty personal servants and retainers. Hidalgos here at Isabella had also servants, but no one more than two or three. It was among these folk that first arose our amazing jealousies ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... OPTIC is a nom de plume that is known and loved by almost every boy of intelligence in the land. We have seen a highly intellectual and world-weary man, a cynic whose heart was somewhat embittered by its large experience of human nature, take up one of OLIVER OPTIC's books, and read it at a sitting, neglecting his work in yielding to the fascination of the pages. ...
— Fighting for the Right • Oliver Optic
... physiognomy of disease includes not merely its face, but its voice; not only the picture that it draws, but the sound that it makes. For, when all has been allowed and discounted that the most hardened cynic or pessimistic agnostic can say about speech being given to man to conceal his thoughts, and the hopeless unreliability of human testimony, two-thirds of what your patients tell you about their symptoms will be found to be literally the voice ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... shall give is entirely sane and will be accepted by the rankest cynic. America came into the war at the moment she realised that her own national life was endangered. Her leaders realised this months before her masses could be persuaded. The political machinery of the United States is such that no Government would dare to commence hostilities ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... on, long; each cliff-top bough, Like a cynic nodding there, Moved up and down, though no man's brow But ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... Plutarch rather reminds one, in his evident contempt for Epitaphs, of the cynic who asked, "Where are all the ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... the quaint old cynic, "matters can't be mended by swearin' at 'em, is advice I often give myself, but never take. I s'pose it's bed-time. To-morrow we will take another squint at your ugly fortunes, and see which side pints toward daylight. Would you mind readin' a ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... in my house by the side of the road, Where the race of men go by. They are good, they are bad, they are weak, they are strong, Wise, foolish—and so am I. So why should I sit in the scorner's seat, Or hurl the cynic's ban? Let me live in my house by the side of the road, And be ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... spoke, the long-pent murmur went forth, and the philosophers that were mingled with the people, muttered their sage contempt; there might you have seen the chilling frown of the Stoic, and the Cynic's sneer; and the Epicurean, who believeth not even in our own Elysium, muttered a pleasant jest, and swept laughing through the crowd: but the deep heart of the people was touched and thrilled; and they trembled, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... Saturday reviewers and their antagonists was carried on with a frequent use of the nicknames 'prig' and 'cynic' upon one side, and 'buffoon' and 'sentimentalist' upon the other. Phrases so employed soon lose all definite meaning, but it is, I think, easy to see what they meant as applied either by or to Fitzjames. The 'comic writers' for him were exponents of the petty and vulgar ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... terrors for the sound, Nor is the hand that wields it harshly bound To ceaseless vivisection. The Cynic sharply sees, but sees not far; The eye that hunts the mote may miss the star Too great ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... for him!" said Clementina. "Epictetus was a Cynic, a very cruel man: he broke his slave's ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... Whig"), but most of all perhaps to a sort of horrified recoil from the novelist's easy handling of temptations which were no easy matter to his critic—was nearly if not quite propitiated by it: and the enthusiasm for it of such a "cynic" as Thackeray is well known. Of the very few persons whom it would not be ridiculous to name with these, Scott—whose competence in criticising his own art is one of the most wonderful though the least generally recognised things about him—inclines, in the interesting Introduction-Dialogue ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... Adrian Harley, as he hears Sir Austin's footfall, and truly that was a strange object to see.—Where is the fortress that has not one weak gate? where the man who is sound at each particular angle? Ay, meditates the recumbent cynic, more or less mad is not every mother's son? Favourable circumstances—good air, good company, two or three good rules rigidly adhered to—keep the world out of Bedlam. But, let the world fly into a passion, and is not Bedlam the safest ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... play the cynic or think meanly of my fellow-man shall come, my mind will hark back to those two unpretending fellows and bow in reverence before the selflessness and immensity of the human soul. Needing bread, they gave it freely away; ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... happier than when I have more to think of and to do than I can manage in a given period'. Idleness and insouciance had few temptations for them, cynicism was abhorrent to them. Even Thackeray was perpetually 'caught out' when he assumed the cynic's pose. Charlotte Bronte, most loyal of his admirers and critics, speaks of the 'deep feelings for his kind' which he cherished in his large heart, and again of the 'sentiment, jealously hidden but genuine, which extracts the venom from that ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... replied the cynic; "without it, few pursue successfully, and fewer are themselves pursued.—Stop!" he said to Miss Vere, as her companions moved off, "With you I have more to say. You have what your companions would wish to have, or be thought to ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... a many months' run, Witnesses Two Hundred, Ninety and One: Clergymen, guardians, factors, physicians, Middlemen, labourers, smart statisticians, Journalists, managers, Gentiles and Jews, And this is the issue! A thing to amuse A cynic, the chat of this precious Committee, But moving kind hearts to despair blent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 24, 1890 • Various
... and thought about it alone. The sight of big business compelling its desires the while the people went begging was destructive. Many a romantic, illusioned, idealistic young country editor, lawyer, or statesman was here made over into a minor cynic or bribe-taker. Men were robbed of every vestige of faith or even of charity; they came to feel, perforce, that there was nothing outside the capacity for taking and keeping. The surface might appear commonplace—ordinary men of ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... taste and refined judgment. She was also considered to be honest in spirit and candid in her expression of opinion. What she said she meant, whether in praise or in censure; and no one could say she was a flatterer or a cynic. ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... a critic, as skilful as Salmasius or Scaliger, but still more learned in the language of abuse. This cynic was the Attila of authors. He boasted that he had occasioned the deaths of Casaubon and Scaliger. Detested and dreaded as the public scourge, Scioppius, at the close of his life, was fearful he should find no retreat in which he might ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... illustrious dead, either in the old world or the new, we are not seldom astonished upon reading the sculptured testimony of the survivors, to find that "'tis still the best that leave us." One may well wonder, with the Arch-Cynic, where the bones of all the sinners are deposited. In the case of Governor Simcoe, however, there is much to be said in the way of just commendation, and the inscription is not so nauseously fulsome us to excite disgust. Toronto's citizens, especially, should ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... life he partook of the character of the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Cynic, not in the modern but the ancient sense of the word. In his personal qualities the Stoic predominated. His standard of morals was Epicurean, inasmuch as it was utilitarian, taking as the exclusive test of right and wrong, the tendency of actions to produce pleasure or pain. But he had (and ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... Cynic perforce from studying mankind In the false volume of his single mind, He damned his fellows for his own unworth, And, bad himself, thought nothing good on earth. Yet, still so judging and so erring ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... system.... Prop it as you please, it continually sinks into Court government, and ever will." Finally he urged a limitation of armaments, and prophesied that wars would cease when nations had their freely elected Conventions. The cynic will remember with satisfaction that, two months later, began the war between France and Austria, which developed into the most tremendous series of ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... he had no claim. He complained of the injustice of the spectators, when, in truth, he ought to have been grateful for their unexampled patience. He lost his temper and spirits, and became a cynic and a hater of mankind. From London be retired to Hampton, and from Hampton to a solitary and long-deserted mansion, built on a common in one of the wildest tracts of Surrey.(10) No road, not even a sheepwalk, connected his ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... attracted to Shelley simply by his "rare talents as a scholar;" and Trelawny has recorded his opinion that Hogg's portrait of their friend was faithful, in spite of a total want of sympathy with his poetic genius. This testimony is extremely valuable.) Hogg had much of the cynic in his nature; he was a shrewd man of the world, and a caustic humorist. Positive and practical, he chose the beaten path of life, rose to eminence as a lawyer, and cherished the Church and State opinions of a staunch Tory. Yet, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... a mist of such very small rain as to dispel almost insensibly, cooling the fragrant breeze which breathed from the flowers and shrubs, that were so disposed as to send a waste of sweets around. One goodly old man, named Michael Agelastes, big, burly, and dressed like an ancient Cynic philosopher, was distinguished by assuming, in a great measure, the ragged garb and mad bearing of that sect, and by his inflexible practice of the strictest ceremonies exigible by the Imperial family. He was known by an affectation of cynical principle and language, and ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... had committed himself to action, Boyd Emerson became a different being. He was no longer the dispirited cynic of yesterday, but an eager, voluble optimist athirst for knowledge and afire with impatience. On the homeward drive he had bombarded Cherry with a running fusillade of questions, so that by the time they had arrived at her house she was mentally and ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... The requirements are stern and high, and they exclude the vermin that infest 'politics,' as they are called, and cause them to stink in many nostrils. The self-seeking schemer, the one-eyed partisan, the cynic who disbelieves in ideals of any sort, the charlatan who assumes virtues that he does not possess, and mouths noble sentiments that go no deeper than his teeth, are all shut out by them. The doctrine that a man may do in his public capacity things ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... wealth which seems to tempt him, we yet see distinctly enough that the vanity of wishing to be singular, in both the parts that he plays, had some share in his liberal self-forgetfulness, as well as in his anchoritical seclusion. This is particularly evident in the incomparable scene where the cynic Apemantus visits Timon in the wilderness. They have a sort of competition with each other in their trade of misanthropy: the Cynic reproaches the impoverished Timon with having been merely driven by necessity to take to ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... he came to think better of all others. For he had thought less of all the world because he had thought so little of himself. He had overestimated his own faults, had made them into crimes in his own eyes, and, observing things in others of similar import, had become almost a cynic in intellect, while in heart he ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... just here. The Masked Lady and Mr. Literal were there, after all, standing close behind Everychild. And Mr. Literal was saying: "She seems to be a bit of a cynic. That reference to women on the go . . . what period should ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... exit. But the junior magistrate, a kind-hearted man, troubled at what seemed to him a certain sardonical disdain, lurking beneath the foundling's humble mien, and in Christian sympathy more distressed at it on his account than on his own, dimly surmising what might be the final fate of such a cynic solitaire, nor perhaps uninfluenced by the general strangeness of surrounding things, this good magistrate had glanced sadly, sideways from the speaker, and thereupon his foreboding eye had started at the expression of the unchanging face of the ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... predecessors had tried to nationalize on Parnassus. It was a Bohemian, Mathurin Regnier, who was one of the last defenders of the bulwarks of poetry, assailed by the phalanx of rhetoricians and grammarians who declared Rabelais barbarous and Montaigne obscure. It was this same cynic, Mathurin Regnier, who, adding fresh knots to the satiric whip of Horace, exclaimed, in indignation at the manners of his day, "Honor is an old saint ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... jeered at him. "What will you do? She will not 'be under obligations.' Perhaps, even, she likes her strange profession; perhaps she finds the delight of battle, that you know so well, in pitting her wits against the brains of the mighty; perhaps she has a cynic soul that finds a savage joy in running down the faults of the seemingly faultless—running them to earth and taking her profit therefrom. Who are you, Marcus Gard, to cavil at the lust of conquest—to sneer at the controlling ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... 1917, seems to deserve the title of "the great Loan Land." Amateurs of anagrams have found satisfaction in the identity of "Bonar Law" with "War Loan B." As a cynic has remarked, "in the midst of life we are in debt." But the champions of national economy are not happy. The staff of the new Pensions Minister, it is announced, will be over two thousand. It is still hoped, however, ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... position Chesterton lays great stress. It was this, he thinks, that made him an optimist. It was the same position that made Browning an optimist. It is the disbelief in the Divine image in Man that makes the cynic and the pessimist. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... lesson; and is it not this: that if, next to mistrusting Providence, there be aught that man should pray against, it is against mistrusting his fellow-man. I have been in mad-houses full of tragic mopers, and seen there the end of suspicion: the cynic, in the moody madness muttering in the corner; for years a barren fixture there; head lopped over, gnawing his own lip, vulture of himself; while, by fits and starts, from the corner opposite came the grimace of ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... very slowly that the actual tidings reached her ears. Mr. Caldigate, when he tried to tell them, found that the power of words had left him. Old as he was, and prone to cynic indifference as he had shown himself, he was affected almost like a young girl. He sobbed convulsively as he hung over her, embracing her. 'My daughter!' he ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... in this case of the essence of the matter, and the party of resistance will all the more earnestly maintain that the defenders should hold the forts till the invaders have become civilised. "The individual withers and the world is more and more," preludes, though over a long interval, the cynic comment of the second "Locksley Hall" on the "increasing purpose" of the age. At an earlier date "Luria" had protested against ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... to doubt his indignation. Wasn't he after all a prude to get so hot? Wasn't he perhaps a prig, a sissy? At times he thought that he was; at other times he was sure that he wasn't. He could be permanently sure of only one thing, that he was a cynic. ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... its two predecessors, chiefly on account of its libretto, which, though a brisk little comedy of intrigue, is almost too slight to bear a musical setting. The plot turns upon a wager laid by two young officers with an old cynic of their acquaintance to prove the constancy of their respective sweethearts. After a touching leave-taking they return disguised as Albanians and proceed to make violent love each one to the other's fiancee. The ladies at first resist the ardent strangers, but end by giving way, and ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... peered another, only a trifle older and more serious, yet every whit as pretty. Wing raised his old felt hat and mentally cursed the luck that had sent him down there in his ragged shirt-sleeves. Pike, the cynic, busied himself in getting the buckets from underneath the stout spring wagon, and bumped his head savagely against the trunk-laden boot ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... the sociologist should find much to say touching the relation of nations to each other and to subject peoples goes without saying. But the cynic may maintain with some plausibility that the moralist's chapter on International Ethics must be as void of content as the traditional chapter on "Snakes in Ireland." In this the cynic is wrong, as usual; but it ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... comings. The mere presence of this one young man seemed to put all the servants on their mettle. The cook sent up such meals as she did not at any other time. "Sure Sir Shawn and her Ladyship never minded what they would be atin," she said. The gardener, a gruff old cynic usually, gave his best grapes and peaches for "Master Terry"; even the small sewing maid who sat in a slip of a room at a remote corner of the house, mending the house-linen under the supervision of the housekeeper, was known to have said that though ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... Zola, grimy as his theme, Nosing the sewers with cynic pleasure, Sceptic of all that poets dream, All hopes that simple mortals treasure; With sense most keen for odours strong, He stirs the Drains and scents disaster, Grim monarch of the Dismal Throng Who bow their heads before ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various |
