"Cynical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... femme is a French saying, which has somewhat of a cynical ring about it. The female hand has to be discovered in the family alliances of the Cavendishes and the Bentincks from which a tangle of intrigue may be unravelled. There was in the first instance that accomplished matchmaker, Bess Hardwick, a country squire's daughter, who was married four times, ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... each other's old habits, and one Friar goes about darned because of another's rending, so the poet of a certain order grows cynical for the sake of many poets' old loves. Not otherwise will the resultant verse succeed in implying so much—or rather so many, in the feminine plural. The man of very sensitive individuality might hesitate at the adoption. The Franciscan is understood to have a fastidiousness ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... my friend, with the cynical shrug of the newspaper man, "she has very promptly succeeded. It's whispered that she is going to marry Joyce—of Malduna Island, you know. Only met him a fortnight ago. Quite a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... she had not won one of those extraordinary successes which place an author suddenly at the top of the ladder, she was steadily climbing upward, and was well known for her good and conscientious work. The books she wrote were clever, though cynical and captious; yet here and there they contained passages of pathos and beauty which insured a fair amount of favor. Her work was always welcome and well paid, so well that she could live comfortably on the income she made for herself, ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... affair between his alter ego and the Lady Essex might be looked upon as mere dalliance, a passionate episode likely to wither with a speed equal to that of its growth, Overbury, it is probable, found cynical amusement in helping it on. But when, as time went on, the lady and her husband separated permanently, and from mere talk of a petition for annulment of the Essex marriage that petition was presented ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... though austere and solemn, was by no means morose and cynical, and never blunted the laudable sensibilities of his character, or exempted him from the influence of the tender passions. Want of tenderness, he always alledged, was want of parts, and was no less a ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... slowly his pale face took on a look of cynical amusement. "Yes, yes. Certainly. Who more so?" He appeared to hesitate a moment, and then added with a laugh which held a curious tinge of defiance: "In fact, I myself have the honor of being the owner and editor of the Gazette—Coligny Smith, ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... illegitimate daughter by a servant girl, Elizabeth Paton. The verses which carry allusion to this affair are illuminating for his character. One group is devout and repentant; the other marked sometimes by cynical bravado, sometimes by a note of exultation. Both may be regarded as genuine enough expressions of moods which alternated throughout his life, and which corresponded to conflicting sides of his nature. Here is a ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... contrives to reach maturity at all. What with the mackerel and the seagulls and the barristers, everybody seems to be against it. However, Walter, Rupert and Foch succeeded. Stephanie just missed. Walter and Rupert and Foch had jolly soft roes, a fact which is recorded in a cynical little poem by the precocious Foch, believed to be the only literary work of a whitebait now extant. We have only space here to quote the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... Harcourt, without noticing Grant's half cynical superiority, "but you'll oblige me if you won't tell it again IN THAT WAY. There are men here mean enough to make the worst of it. It's nothing to me, of course, but my family—the ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... many a long year since my dear friend Messer Guido dei Cavalcanti died of that disastrous exile to which, by the cynical irony of fate, my other dear friend, Messer Dante dei Alighieri, was foredestined to doom him. That sadness has nothing to do with this sadness, and I here give it the go-by. But at nights when I lie awake in my cell—a thing which, I thank my stars happens ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... death could be conveniently shifted. The Satan or Adversary is still one of the sons of God who, like all his brethren, has free access to the council chamber of the Most High, where he is wont to take a critical, somewhat cynical but not wholly incorrect view of motives and of men. In the government of the world he has neither hand nor part, and his interference in the affairs of Job is the result of a special permission ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... rather sharply, "that is true enough; but if that cynical quotation of yours has anything in it, it's equally true, isn't it, that friendship is a matter of cabs, and street cars, and the elevated road? Of course, we can hardly be expected to look you up, but Sixty-ninth ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... were moments in which he was tempted to think the same of himself; bitter moments of cynical world-wisdom, in which he scoffed at himself for having been led to play the part he had played for these last eight months. He would resolve at such moments to "speak plainly" to Paolina; and, if such plain-speaking ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... cynical, and his grim lips curled with a slightly contemptuous twitch. The hot, impulsive streak in Dick leaped upward. His eyes were ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... muttered the crow, always a cynical fellow. "His principles are his own beech-trees. If anybody touched them he would not object ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... man, saw nothing radically wrong in the dispositions of any of his nieces. Their youth and girlishness appealed to him strongly, and he loved to have them by his side. It is true that he secretly regretted Louise was not more genuine, that Beth was so cynical and frank, and that Patsy was not more diplomatic. But he reflected that he had had no hand in molding their characters, although he might be instrumental in improving them; so he accepted the girls as they were, thankful that their faults were not glaring, and happy to have found three such ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... said the banker, 'that may be a' as you say, sir, and nae doubt wealth makes wit waver; but the country's wealthy, that canna be denied, and wealth, sir, ye ken——' 'I know wealth makes itself wings,' answered the cynical stranger; 'but I am not quite sure we have ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... trees, of the sea. The ear, which enables us to communicate with our fellow men, has also allowed us to invent music, to create dreams, happiness, the infinite and even physical pleasure, by means of sounds! But one might say that the cynical and cunning Creator wished to prohibit man from ever ennobling and idealizing his commerce with women. Nevertheless, man has found love, which is not a bad reply to that sly Deity, and he has ornamented it so ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... lazily-cynical way, "do you think if you or I were in a fit that her Ladyship would run? Bah! these are the things that shake one's faith in human nature. I feel infernally seedy. That cursed Channel passage—I tremble in my inmost stomach when I think of it. ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... forget support, this instinct towards repayment of loyal service, was no piece of cynical calculation, no acting on the maxim that the way to get men to serve you well and support you is to make it clear to them that you always pay your debts with full interest. That Mr. Chamberlain was proud of the fact that no man could call him ungrateful I do not doubt; but I am sure also that ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... months before there was now but a huge mechanical travesty that flouted the unremitting strain and effort of years. He was defacing the everlasting hills with dynamite to make something the commercial world did not want. A surge of protest overcame his spirit, followed by a cynical contempt for the futility of the best efforts of man. Impatiently he walked up to the superintendent of ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... and the Devil's function is to provide the experience. And he is a devil, not the Devil, conceived as the bitter and malignant enemy of God, but a subordinate spirit whose business it is, in the world-economy, to spur man to activity. This he does partly by cynical criticism and opposition, but more especially by holding out the lures of the sensual life. At first Mephistopheles was not thought of as working solely for a reward in the shape of souls captured for eternity, but as ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... apostle of liberty, an outpost of the revolutionary army, and none so well as he could tip the barb with biting sarcasm and satire. Heine's personality was full of seemingly inconsistent traits. He was both fanciful and rational, serious and flippant, tender and cynical, reverent and impious; and he could be at once a patriot and an alien. He was, to use his own phrase, an "unfrocked romanticist"—at once a brilliant representative of the poetry of self-expression and personal caprice, and an exemplar and prophet ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... too was natural—stirred these thoughts into being. Ashen blonde, a shade that would never excite the cynical commentary which men applied to certain types of blondes. It would be protective; it would with age turn to silver unnoticeably. A disconcerting gray eye that had a mystifying depth. In the artificial light her skin had the tint ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... ordered home as soon as he was convalescent, and the sea voyage had worked wonders and built up his weakened constitution. But he was altered, none the less. There were hard lines about his mouth and forehead, and in his eyes was a listless, weary, cynical look—the look of a man who finds life a care and a burden ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... a moment to watch the effect of his revelation of himself to Constance Dunlap. There was a certain cynical bitterness in his tone ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... course at the bottom of this indifference. Johnson was of melancholy humour and profoundly sceptical. Cynical he was not—he loved his fellow-men; his ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... is notorious that most of our Professors never lay out a Farthing either in Pen, Ink, or Paper. Others are for deriving them from Diogenes, because several of the leading Men of the Sect have a great deal of the cynical Humour in them, and delight much in Sun-shine. But then again, Diogenes was content to have his constant Habitation in a narrow Tub; whilst our Philosophers are so far from being of his Opinion, that it's Death to them to ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... little figure of It, his shadow—an interpolation in the bill of fare. A properly qualified dwarf I might have welcomed; but this precocious babe with the false moustache and the sham bald crown and the cynical giggle, who ought to have been in the nursery instead of serving his master with liquid stimulants and assisting in all sorts of wickedness, was a peculiarly nauseating object, and got on my nerves far more than the terrors of the torture-chamber. This painful business was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... the sunshine and watch the Ancient, pipe in mouth, to hearken to his animadversions upon Life, and Death, and Humanity, is better than the cynical wit of Rochefoucauld, or a page ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... us a single detail of everyday life, no matter how commonplace or degrading; he pushes the materialistic delineation of the passions and vices to the extreme limit of obscene gesture and the most cynical ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... He looked at me, and though his eyes were steady and motionless, there seemed a cynical smile in them. "What kind of value? How do you measure ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... painful things. We resolutely put from us sober signs, serious thoughts, and sometimes are really angry with those who exhibit life as it is, and who urge us to seek reconciliation with it. When the physician prescribed blisters to Marie Bashkirtseff to check her consumptive tendency, the vain, cynical girl wrote, "I will put on as many blisters as thee like. I shall be able to hide the mark by bodices brimmed with flowers and lace and tulle, and a thousand other delightful things that are worn, without ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... from us to make any heartless allusion to the fact that Shakespeare's Sonnets were brought out at fivepence, or that for fourpence-halfpenny one could have bought a Martial in ancient Rome. Every man, a cynical American tells us, has the right to beat a drum before his booth. Still, we must acknowledge that Mr. Walter Scott would have been much better employed in correcting some of the more obvious errors that appear in his ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... and then softened for a moment, while his lips quivered; but his hard, cynical, bitter aspect and tones came back—the manner born of years of misery and degradation, ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... tall, graceful, beautiful, looking as one might look whose lifelong martyrdom had come at last to a glorious end; Captain Crawford, bronzed, agitated, a trifle nervous, short of stature, slight of build, with a rather cynical mouth and a small dark moustache; the Hon. Mrs. Brinkworth, a timid, dove-eyed, little wisp of a woman, with a clinging, pathetic, almost childish manner, her soft eyes red with grief, her mobile mouth a-quiver with ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... his thought lay not the high esteem of the poet-thinker for beauty, but the cynical blackguardism ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... Should have anticipated, but for which he was totally unprepared. Opposition in his own party had been growing more and more rigid and cynical. His own opposition to the amendment, his grant of immunity to those leaders in his party who had fought the measure, his isolating himself from those who might have helped-all this was coming to fruition among his subordinates at a time when he could least afford to be ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... down the river past Telegraph Creek without stopping, and late at night laid by at Glenora and unloaded in the crisp, cool dusk. As we came off the boat with our horses we were met by a crowd of cynical loafers who called to us out of the dark, "What in hell you fellows think you're doing?" We were regarded as wildly insane for having come over so ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... county-people. The other guests were staying at Damerstown or had come from a distance; they were very fashionable, but I did not like the very low dresses and the loud talk of the ladies, nor the tired, cynical-looking men. Every one of the men, old and young, wore the same expression. I have seen its like since at a foreign Casino, where I watched ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... must have been of unusual quality, for jaded and cynical Washington learned of its existence, spoke of it and went to see it. It seemed to Enoch that every one he met took special delight in mentioning ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... churches of pale Istrian stone, and where the Campo Santo has for centuries received the dead into its oozy clay. The cemetery is at present undergoing restoration. Its state of squalor and abandonment to cynical disorder makes one feel how fitting for Italians would be the custom of cremation. An island in the lagoons devoted to funeral pyres is a solemn and ennobling conception. This graveyard, with its ruinous walls, its mangy riot of unwholesome weeds, its corpses festering in slime ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... producing their postage stamps by hundreds of millions, are as contemptuous in their consideration of the art possibilities of a postage stamp as the cynical artist whose days and years are devoted to the disfigurement of wall space. This country has no cause to be proud of the designs or the printing of its postage stamps. The chief consideration seems to be a low contract price for the production ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... effectually upon his mouth. He kissed the hand. "No, I won't say it. It's a cynical philosophy, and I'll not take its language on my lips—not with my wife in my arms, giving the lie to that sort of thing. Julie, we're not sentimentalists because we ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... can be no question. The Imperialism of Kipling was equally remote from the Victorian caution and the Victorian idealism: and our subject does quite seriously end here. The world was full of the trampling of totally new forces, gold was sighted from far in a sort of cynical romanticism: the guns opened across Africa; ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... disaster largely arose from the facts that she thought England was simple when England is very subtle. She thought that because our politics have become largely financial that they had become wholly financial; that because our aristocrats had become pretty cynical that they had become entirely corrupt. They could not seize the subtlety by which a rather used-up English gentleman might sell a coronet when he would not sell a fortress; might lower the public standards and yet ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... position in Denboro had changed. But I took no pride in the change, as I had at first; I knew the reason for this sudden burst of popularity. The knowledge made me more cynical than ever—cynical, and lonely. For the first time since I came to the Cape I longed for a real friend, not a relative or an acquaintance, but a friend to trust and confide in. Some one, with no string of his own to pull, who cared for me because ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... The rustics who lived along the road were well accustomed to the sight of a high, tremulous phaeton flashing past them, and the crimson face of the young Prince bending over the horses. There is something absurd in representing George as, even before he came of age, a hardened and cynical profligate, an Elagabalus in trousers. His blood flowed fast enough through his veins. All his escapades were those of a healthful young man of the time. Need we blame him if he sought, every day, to live faster ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... husband's college friend; was now a journalist, and in no sense a society man or "a man about town," which were, perhaps, some of the reasons she had never met him. But she had unconsciously formed an image of him in her mind. She pictured him tall, slim, cynical; with eye-glasses, and his hands in his pockets; and she did not like him. Gouvernail was slim enough, but he wasn't very tall nor very cynical; neither did he wear eyeglasses nor carry his hands in his pockets. And she rather liked him when ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... wasn't to be trusted,' pursued her brother, with gloomy satisfaction. 'And I had far better means of judging than father or you; but, of course, my suspicions were ungenerous and cynical.' ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... officer of the Guards, of large, handsome build, noble, 27 years of age, desires a financial marriage. Please address, Count v. W. I., Post Office General Delivery, Dresden." In comparison with the fellow who makes so cynical an offer, the street-walker, who, out of bitter necessity, plies her trade, is a paragon of decency and virtue. Similar advertisements are found almost every day in the papers of all political parties—except the Social Democratic. ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... rejoined Lin Tai-y, with a cynical smile. "But I came out to have a look as I heard a shriek in the heavens; it turned out, in fact, to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... if you care to hear," said Myerst with another of his cynical laughs. "And if I do, I'll tell you the truth. I know you've got an idea in your heads that isn't favourable to me, but you're utterly wrong, whatever you may think. Look here!—I'll make you a fair offer. There are some cigars in my case there—give ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... stare at him, surprise ineffable in her glance—not at the thing that he suggested, but at the abruptness with which the suggestion came. The cynical, sneering tone rang in her ears after the words were spoken, and she looked in his face for a ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... frank and clear in the morning air as "Baedeker" came fluttering down at their feet. Mr. Belmont and Colonel Cochrane followed, the brims of their sun-hats touching as they discussed the relative advantages of the Mauser, the Lebel, and the Lee-Metford. Behind them walked Cecil Brown, listless, cynical, self-contained. The fat clergyman puffed slowly up the bank, with many gasping witticisms at his own defects. "I'm one of those men who carry everything before them," said he, glancing ruefully at his rotundity, and ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... be quite America enough," pursued my cynical hostess. "I have kept a boarding-house for forty years. I ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... be cynical, Boney! It's so damned cheap! There! I've done swearing at you for the present. It's wonderful how you fellows bear with me. Find Hudson, will you? And then go and tell Lady Carfax that I am afraid I can't visit her this evening ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... not. But, although he was clearly a musical genius, he insisted on projecting a tonal, romantic "beauty" in his music, confining his music to a narrow range of moral values and ideals. He would have rejected 20th-century music that entertained cynical notions of any kind, or notions that obviated the concept of beauty in any way. There is no Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Cage, Adams and certainly no Schoenberg in Liszt's music. His music has an ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... with Duane Mallett seemed to be his gaily cynical willingness to respond to any advance, however slight, that any pretty woman offered. This responsive partiality was disconcerting enough to make him dreaded by ambitious mothers, and an object of uneasy interest to their decorative offspring ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... fraud; and I myself had my own hobby of the romance of small things, including small commonwealths. But to all these Belloc entered like a man armed, and as with a clang of iron. He brought with him news from the fronts of history; that French arts could again be rescued by French arms; that cynical Imperialism not only should be fought, but could be fought and was being fought; that the street fighting which was for me a fairytale of the future was for him a fact of the past. There were many other uses of his ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... Homeric traditions, and adopts the late myths which denied that Helen ever went to Troy. She remained in Egypt, and Achaeans and Trojans fought for a mere shadow, formed by the Gods out of clouds and wind. In the "Cyclops" of Euripides, a satirical drama, the cynical giant is allowed to speak of Helen in a strain of coarse banter. Perhaps the essay of Isocrates on Helen may be regarded as a kind of answer to the attacks of several speakers in the works of the tragedians. Isocrates defends Helen simply on the ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... cynical philosophy there was real kindness as well as shrewd common-sense in the little seamstress. She was in some respects one of the best advisers Gladys could possibly have ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... fancy, the land of Washington and Lincoln, Hawthorne and Emerson, is to my adult thoughts. Does this mean that I approach America in the temper of a romantic schoolboy? Perhaps; but, bias for bias, I would rather own to that of the romantic schoolboy than to that of the cynical Old-Worldling. ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... the darkened doorway. Mr. Jack Lamont stood there with a cynical expression on his face. His hat was tilted back on his head, and a half-smoked cigarette sagged from his lips. The genial warmth of the room seemed chilled by ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... the guilty man? However, the world has not moved, the world has not trembled, the world is not now up in arms. And who would guarantee that another time when the case will be perhaps less flagrant, the crime more obscure, the aggressor less cynical, the world will tremble and ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... understand," said Gabriel, "the cynical confession of the Canon Llorente explaining why he became secretary to the Holy Office: 'They began to roast, and in order not to be roasted I took on me the part of roaster.' For intelligent men there was nothing else to be done. How could they resist and rebel? The king, master of all lives and ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... she "had no stomach," and "could not pick a lark's bones," she finished by eating more than Clare and Blanche put together. Jack, meanwhile, was attending to his own personal wants, and took no notice of his bride, beyond a cynical remark now and then, to which Gertrude returned a sharp answer. It was evident that no ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... own vanities, remorseful at their own intemperate hilarities, saying, at last, of laughter, 'It is mad, and of mirth, what doth it?' Stoical he may have been, for that belongs, almost of course, to natural magnanimity, and familiarity with large and elevated themes; but ascetic and cynical he was not, and could not have been, with his appreciation of Christian truth, and experience of a ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... the resentment which arose from a realization that he must expect nothing else, that it was not injustice so much as stupidity. He reflected that this was natural. A cynical conclusion arose in his mind. There was no substance, after all, in this loose talk about sympathy and gratitude and the obligation of a proud country to those who had served overseas. Why should there be? He was an individual among other individuals who were unconsciously actuated by rampant ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... do you give your trumps to sound before your Millennium dawns?" said "little Lucy," feeling strangely old and cynical beside this incorrigible idealist. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... dead and dying men. One of them is gone; the other soon will be. The slaves will bury them, and those other three at the foot of the hill—d' ye hear, ye black niggers? There 's hardly room enough on the sloop for the living," he continued with cynical indifference. ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... sense of the responsibility for impartial judgment in international affairs, as distinguished from the opportunity for negotiation in international affairs. We are too apt, both those who are despondent about the progress of civilization and those who are cynical about the unselfishness of mankind, to be impatient in our judgment, and to forget how long the life of a nation is, and how slow the processes of civilization are; how long it takes to change character and to educate whole peoples up to different standards of moral ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... Cadet's cynical eyes flashed in genuine sympathy with Bigot, and he laid his heavy hand upon his shoulder and uttered a frank exclamation of admiration at his ruse to cheat La Pompadour and La ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... no sound, but he had bent his head over his sewing and his broad shoulders were shaking. He lifted a face of elderly, cynical mirth. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... days in Fort Greene Place, then fled to her own house. A light, amusing letter from Berkley awaited her. It was so like him, gay, cynical, epigrammatic, and inconsequent, that it cheered her. Besides, he subscribed himself very obediently hers, but on re-examining the letter she noticed that he had made no mention of coming to pay his ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... any charges against him? Maybe I want to ask his advice. Maybe he could help us straighten out this thing. Got to pull together, haven't we?" A cynical light in the eyes of the young man ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... "Crystal is not a reactionary; Crystal is a child," she replied. "But what can you expect of William Cord's daughter? He is a dangerous and disintegrating force—cold—cynical—he feels not the slightest public responsibility for his possessions." Mrs. Dawson laid her hand on her heart as if it were weighted with all her jewels and footmen and palaces. "Most Bourbons are cynical about human life, but he goes farther; he is cynical ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... up and drew back her chair. "Be careful. You might become cynical. It is in thinking of others that ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... In the first place, there is the question whether the greater part by far of the imaginative and other literature of any time does not itself "go into the melting pot," and whether it much matters what sends it there. In the second, if this seems too cynical, there is the very large and grave question whether a still larger proportion of the novel of manners, in England, France, and all other countries during the same time, has not been as bad as, or worse than, the romantic division, historical or other. But the worst faults of the judgment ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... the sexual appetite and love generally produces in man a peculiar phenomenon. While habitual gratification and education of the sexual appetite tends to make it more and more calculating and cynical, love, on the contrary, becomes more elevated and refined with age and less egoistical than in youth. Owing to general mental development, the education of sentiments progresses and becomes refined, while the sexual appetite diminishes in intensity and becomes ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... lived and died obscurely. Another we shall consider as the work of him(5) who restored Painting when it had almost sunk; of him whom art made honourable, but who, neglecting and despising greatness with a sort of cynical pride, was treated suitably to the figure he gave himself, not his intrinsic worth; which, (he) not having philosophy enough to bear it, broke his heart. Another is done by one(6) who (on the contrary) was a fine gentleman and lived in great magnificence, and was ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... to-day had not Daumier, who was often effective at his expense, happened to have represented him, in some crisis of his career, as a sort of naked inconsolable Vitellius. He renders the human body with a cynical sense of its possible flabbiness and an intimate acquaintance with its structure. "Une Promenade Conjugale," in the series of "Tout ce qu'on voudra," portrays a hillside, on a summer afternoon, on which a man has thrown himself on his back to rest, ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... than in any other. It stood firm and unshaken while it kept its promise of peace and prosperity—the firmer that it embodied so distinctly the errors and illusions of the many, and not the less popular that it showed so profound and cynical a contempt for the intelligence of the few. Its Budgets alone would have been fatal to a Government resting on and responsible to Opinion, for the rapid growth of the Debt in a time of peace and plenty would have terrified men accustomed to sift the 'capital' ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... the laugh of the year. It looked like the lightnings of a just heaven had struck where they was long overdue. Then it was discovered that Homer was hiding out over in the hills with a man after coyotes with traps and poison. His job must of appealed to Homer's cynical nature at that moment—anything with traps and ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... these presages of fate; and did not too closely question whether the threatened danger was to their own nation or to some other, to their ruler or to his enemy. Now and then, as in the case of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, there was a cynical attempt to apply some reasoning to the portent. That emperor, in alluding to the comet of A.D. 79, is reported to have said: "This hairy star does not concern me; it menaces rather the King of the Parthians, for he is hairy and I am bald." Vespasian, ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... not for his wife, then; nay, for wifehood itself, that he wrote? And so, was it quite fair for unmarried Penfield Evans, burning at his breakfast table a cynical cigarette over the printed philippic, to murmur, "Gee! old George has ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... his face sad. J. John Reynolds, backer of the Bunch, had promised to come down, later. Chief of Police, Bill Hobard, was there, looking grim, as if he was half glad and half sorry to lose this passel of law-abiding but worrisome young eccentrics. There were various cynical and curious loafers around, too. There were Chippie Potter and his mutt—a more wistful and worshipping pair would have ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... sight," he said. "What right had he to come here prying into a lady's affairs?—at least a lady as far as HE knows. Of course she's some old blowzy with frumpled hair trying to rope in a greenhorn with a string of words and phrases," concluded Jack, carelessly, who had an equally cynical distrust of the sex ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... as though to find out whether his remark was meant seriously or whether he might venture to be cynical. Elsmere writing! Why should everybody write books? It was absurd! The scholar who knows what toll scholarship takes of life is always apt to resent the intrusion of the man of action into his domains. It looks to him like a kind of ridiculous assumption that any one d'un coeur leger can do what ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... narrownesses and meannesses and vanities and uglinesses of life, in mass and class and individual, are now impossible!—and all through Barty Josselin and his quaint ironies of pen and pencil, forever trembling between tears and laughter, with never a cynical spark or a hint ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... that, it was scarcely his fault if the society columns had been busy in a concerted effort to marry him off—no doubt with a cynical eye on possible black-type headlines of future domestic discord. Among those mentioned by the enterprising society reporters of the papers had been the same Miss Violet Winslow whose picture I had admired. Evidently Garrick had ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... Henry died "at hys most pryncely howse at Westminster, comenly called Yorkeplace or Whytehall"—the palace which Cardinal Wolsey built for himself, and which Henry appropriated, extending its grounds and preserves in cynical contempt of public convenience and utter disregard of the chartered rights of the citizens of London.(1262) There his corpse remained until the 14th February, when it was removed at 8 o'clock in the morning to Sion House, near Richmond, and thence conveyed ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... effect she produced on me: for, in the abstract, no womanly character could seem to have less affinity for that of a shrinking, romantic, passionate youth than Bertha's. She was keen, sarcastic, unimaginative, prematurely cynical, remaining critical and unmoved in the most impressive scenes, inclined to dissect all my favourite poems, and especially contemptous towards the German lyrics which were my pet literature at that time. To this moment I am unable to ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... are senseless, deaf that tomb, This is the callous, cold resort of art. 'I give you this.' What do I give? to whom? Words to the air, and balm to my own heart, To its old luxurious and commanded smart. An end to all this tuning, This cynical masquerading; What comfort now in that far final gloom ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... have an enormous longing after the highest and best in all shapes—a longing which haunts me and is the demon which ever impels me to work, and will let me have no rest unless I am doing his behests. The honours of men I value so far as they are evidences of power, but with the cynical mistrust of their judgment and my own worthiness, which always haunts me, I put very little faith in them. Their praise makes me sneer inwardly. God forgive me if I do them any ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... The cynical Hebert, being brought before the unfortunate Queen, dared at length to prefer the charges wrung from the young Prince. He said that Charles Capet had given Simon an account of the journey to Varennes, ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... fight was not to end so simply and speedily as the old man imagined. "The Mercury" dawned on Grey Town, strong, cynical, and up to date. There were initial troubles with the Cable News Agency, but Cairns managed to adjust these, against the determined opposition of Ebenezer Brown. Then came splendid days for the advertising public, when both newspapers ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... the stony barrens of the Jordan; from the Judean hill country, away from the stately temple service with its music and impressive ritual, to his simple open-air, plain, fervid preaching, he drew men. All sorts came, the proud Pharisee, the cynical Sadducee, the soldiers, the publicans, farmers, shepherds, tradespeople—all came. His daily gatherings represented the whole people. The nation came to his call. It was the unconscious testimony of the nation to his rugged greatness ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... criticize Government as fully and fearlessly, and, one may add, often as unjustly, as party newspapers in this country are wont to criticize the Government of the day. It is no longer free to preach revolution and murder with the cynical audacity shown in some of the quotations I have given various Nationalist organs. "Repression" in India, whether of the seditious press, or of secret societies, or of unlawful meetings, means nothing more cruel or oppressive than the application of surgery to diseased growths which threaten ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... no one knows so little of his fellow-men as the cynical, misanthropic man, who walks in darkness because he hates his brother. Be sure that the truly wise and understanding man is he who by sympathy puts himself in his neighbours' place; feels with them and for them; sees with their eyes, hears with ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... him to take it, pray, that you identify yourself with the affair so persistently and violently?" demanded Mr. Galloway, in a cynical tone. And Roland answered with a hot ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... romances about this lady of the motor-car. He wondered why she should have been with the shady Irishman—if Irishman he was—O'Hara, and with some anxiety he wondered what the two were to each other. Captain Stewart's little cynical jest came to his mind, and he was conscious of a sudden desire to kick Miss ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... of such pieces more unpleasantly obtrusive; but that in looking round the assembly of fine ladies at Dejazet's performances, I comforted myself by feeling very sure that half of them did not understand what they were listening to; but I think it must have been "nuts" to the clever, cynical, witty, impudent Frenchwoman to see these dames trois fois respectables swallow ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Walter Ryder had been a great social success; he had introduced an absolutely foreign element into the Bush party. His pose of the cynical, dashing, amiable aristocrat, with a cheerful contempt for all aristocratic pretensions, was admirably sustained. His ready good-fellowship pleased the men; his good looks, his facility in adopting a deep ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... discouragingly weak—an occasional government investigation, an impassioned protest from a few individuals, a placid charity, were about all that the middle-class public had to say about factory life. The cynical indifference of legislatures and the hypocrisy of the dominant parties were all that politics had to offer. The Lawrence strike touched the most impervious: story after story came to our ears of hardened reporters who suddenly refused to misrepresent ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... short silence, while they all, even the cynical Barinskoi, contemplated the book before them, On the ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... the cynical face in front of him. "Cotton," he said, "the shepherds are asleep; but the watch-dogs are barking. Haven't you ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... a cynical scowl. "One sniff. And the drug takes all your worries away. You're nine feet tall and the world's your plaything, when you're up on dream dust. Everything you look at has six different colors." Bitterly ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... fashion of the times to regard such affairs lightly, making of them nothing.... Much I have heard, little learned, save that the old lessons seem to be the truest; the old laws the best. And that our cynical and modern disregard of them make one's salvation none the surer, ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... seen when we study the I. W. W., the above is the program of the world-wide conspiracy of a single class, a minority of society, to carry out the cynical purpose of I. W. W.'ism—to "take possession of the earth and the machinery ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... come to me. I worship Dicky. He sweeps me off my feet with his love, his vivid personality overpowers my more commonplace self, but through all the bewildering intoxication of my engagement and marriage a little mocking devil, a cool, cynical, little devil, is constantly whispering in my ear: "You fool, you fool, to imagine you can escape unhappiness! There is no such thing as ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... sad reserve that almost approached melancholy at times, while her daughter, with more life and spirit in her face, passed rapidly through all sorts of varying moods, until one could scarcely tell whether the affectation lay in a certain cynical audacity in her speech, or whether it lay in her assumption of a certain coyness and archness, or whether there was any affectation at all in the matter. However that might be, there could be no doubt about the sincerity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... handsome he was! how well he photographed! that was her thought. She had seen him so often, with just this expression, looking at her. His pleasant, lazy, half-sarcastic voice was in her ear, saying something coolly impertinent—his gray, half-smiling, half-cynical eyes were looking life-like up at her. What was he doing now? Sleeping calmly, no doubt—she forgotten as she deserved to be. When to-morrow came, would he by any chance remember it was her wedding-day, ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... peculiarities of all his former efforts. It is as full of political prejudice and partisan advocacy as any of his parliamentary speeches. It makes the facts of English History as fabulous as his Lays do those of Roman tradition; and it is written with as captious, as dogmatical, and as cynical a spirit as the bitterest of his Reviews. That upon so serious an undertaking he has lavished uncommon exertion, is not to be doubted; nor can any one during the first reading escape the entrainement of his picturesque, vivid, and pregnant execution: ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... they were all exhibiting human nature at its stateliest, most dignified, and most refined pitch. The consciousness that the thin surface only conceals some of the worst elements of character in full force and activity must give a pleasantly stinging sensation to an acutely cynical woman. However, this is all over ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... probably be taking away the brandy bottle for himself. But Georgie knew he was only too apt to indulge In secret cynicisms and perhaps there was no brandy to take away by this time ... and lo and behold, he was being cynical again. ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... never seen. What was he thinking about? What grim secret lay behind the mysterious smile that flickered about the corners of those eyes? He was not thinking of her. The mood was new and cold and cynical, for all the laughter he might put ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... worthy Mrs. Miller, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, Mrs. Waters, Lady Bellaston,—all are to the full as real. Lady Bellaston especially, deserves more than a word. Like Lady Booby in Joseph Andrews, she is not a pleasant character; but the picture of the fashionable demirep, cynical, sensual, and imperious, has never been drawn more vigorously, or more completely—even by Balzac. Lastly, there is the adorable Sophia herself, whose pardon should be asked for naming her in such close proximity to her frailer sister. ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... was rather a darkening of the spirit which fell back upon itself, to find a more grievous darkness within. Margaret nearly spoke a dozen times, but something throttled her. She felt petty and awkward, and her meditations on Christmas grew more cynical. Peace? It may bring other gifts, but is there a single Londoner to whom Christmas is peaceful? The craving for excitement and for elaboration has ruined that blessing. Goodwill? Had she seen any example of it in the hordes of purchasers? Or in herself. She had failed ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... the broad day again, waking to find Jack Travers standing by my bed, pale and cynical, dusting off the ashes from the end of ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... have got all I want of that particular sex for the time being." Mavering wore a very bitter air as he said this; it seemed to him that he would always be cynical; he rose, and arranged to leave his bag with the restaurateur, who put it under the counter, and then he went out ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... looking hopelessly for a place to sleep, when a cart drawn by two oxen at about one mile an hour came creaking by. The driver was asleep, his head on the shady side. The devil tempted me, and without one struggle against temptation, nay with cynical and congratulatory feelings, I jumped up behind, and putting my head also on the shady side (there were soft sacks for a bed) I very soon was ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... an hour Ethelbertha retired from the contest, hot, dirty, and a trifle irritable. The fireplace retained the same cold, cynical expression with which it had ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... a better appearance, with his dark eyes; his tanned and glowing cheeks; his raven mustached lips, which, parting with a smile, showed white and regular teeth. He was the picture of a gallant soldier; all his old melancholy and cynical bitterness gone, as mist is swept ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... pleasanter as they grew older. Fortunate winds had blown down to them from the distant north; the substantial rewards of the enterprise were eminently satisfactory, and the honors which came to them were not at all unwelcome even to the somewhat cynical Samuel. ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton |
