"Cynicism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... happened!" whispered the lieutenant, blinking guiltily. "Upon my honour, I don't understand it! It's the first time in my life I've come across such a monster! It's not her beauty that does for you, not her mind, but that . . . you understand . . . insolence, cynicism. . . ." ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... her feet on mountain-tops. She had never done anything to arouse discussion in other women. Perhaps such a situation had never confronted her until lately. She had always looked forth upon life through the lenses of mild cynicism. So long as she was rich she might, with impunity, be as indiscreet as she pleased. Her money would plead forgiveness and toleration. . . . Elsa shrugged. But shrugs do not dismiss problems. She could have laughed. To have come all this way to solve a riddle, only to find a second more confusing ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... be able to do any work in New York—or do you really intend to work at all?" This last with soft, almost imperceptible, cynicism. ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... for the thoughts that crowded upon him; but they were not of his danger, great as that still was. The joy of her, and of the thing she had done, flooded him. He might pretend to cynicism to hide his deep pleasure in it; none the less, he ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... road to ruin," returned David. "Dear Eve, listen to me. A man needs an independent fortune, or the sublime cynicism of poverty, for the slow execution of great work. Believe me, Lucien's horror of privation is so great, the savor of banquets, the incense of success is so sweet in his nostrils, his self-love has grown so much in Mme. de ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... numbers hugely swelled by persons as little like their supposed teachers as a Marian or Elizabethan persecutor was like the founder of Christianity—a pest to society. Lucian's sympathy with the best Cynics, and detestation of the worst, make Cynicism one of his most familiar themes. The second is the class so vividly presented in The dependent Scholar—the indigent learned Greek who looks about for a rich vulgar Roman to buy his company, and finds he has the worst of the bargain. His successors, the 'trencher chaplains' who ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... if the illness of genius had at any time affected ME, it was pretty well certain I should now suffer no more from its delicious pangs and honey-sweet fever. I was cured! The probing-knife of the world's cynicism had found its way to the musically throbbing centre of divine disquietude in my brain, and had there cut down the growth of fair imaginations for ever. I thrust aside the bright illusions that had once been my gladness; I forced myself to look with unflinching eyes at the wide waste of universal ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Lear's Fool thus unbedecked is more amazing than Bottom's brutal translation was to his fellow actors. This Fool is a man of middle age, one who has watched the world and grown sad over it. His jesting has a touch of heart-break in it which is prevented from becoming pathetic only by the cynicism which pertains partly to his personal character and partly to his office. He and Kent are about of an age—Kent, who when asked his age, as he comes back disguised to his old master, says, "Not so young as ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... is so perfect when it finds its highest levels, it is capable of sinking to any form of vulgarity, base betrayal and cynicism when realization fails. The God to whom noblest souls aspire in hours of deepest exaltation, is the God invoked by the ribald drunkard when he curses his comrade. The family life we are discussing is the subject ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... is still content that his puppets shall have the air of puppets; he stands in the arena of his circus and cracks his whip; they gallop round grimacing, and with labels on their backs. The verse comes between him and nature, as the satire comes between him and poetry. Cynicism has gone to the making of poetry more than once, but only under certain conditions: that the poet should be a lyric poet, like Heine, or a great personality in action, like Byron, to whom cynicism should be but one ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... feelings, and indifferent whether he gave pain or pleasure. But now and then a remark escaped him—I say "escaped him," because he evidently preferred to wear the acrid tendencies of his character on the outside—which indicated that there was behind his cynicism a rich fund of human kindness and sympathy. And this was strongly confirmed by his neighbors at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, his home, where on one of my campaigning tours I once spent a day and a night. With them, even with many of his political opponents, "old Thad," as they ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... was—selfish, cynical, inconsiderate, brutal. He was astounded at finding himself compelled to admit the truth of these self-made charges. He did not mean to be all these things. At heart he was a good fellow. It was simply the fault of his training. He saw now the truth of what in his egotism and cynicism he had always scoffed at before, that some women are strong enough morally, brave enough physically to do anything, make any sacrifice for the sake of right. How unworthy he had proved himself of such a woman! What respect ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... she had seen his uncle, and heard of the old man's offer. Ten thousand a year was not a large income for one in Lady Lucille Turfleigh's position; but—well, she might have been tempted by it. His face hardened with an expression of cold cynicism which Nell had ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... hatchet-faced and haggard man who looked as if he went to bed about once a week, on an average, and existed principally on cigarettes and absinthe. The simultaneous arrival of Emile and Arithelli roused him from his normal condition of bored cynicism to ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... he had told us practically not a word. He had discussed everything under heaven in his brilliant, erratic way, with a fleer of cynicism toward it all, but he had left himself out completely. He had given us Farquharson with relish, and in infinite detail, from the time the poor fellow first turned up in Muloa, put ashore by a native craft. Talking about Farquharson was second only to his delight in talking about volcanoes. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... differ in at least one fundamental respect from the later representatives of the generation preceding them. Thackeray and Dickens did not deliberately concern themselves about a philosophy of life. With more or less complacency, more or less cynicism, they accepted the religious and social canons which had grown to be the commonplace of the first half of this century. They pictured men and women, not as affected by questions, but as affected by one another. The morality and immorality ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... necessary again to refer to the charge of cynicism that is levelled against Thackeray. The mistake is, as our critic points out, 'taking a vague word and applying it precisely.' It all depends upon what cynicism really means. 'If it means a war on comfort, then Thackeray was, to his eternal credit, a cynic'; 'if it means a war on virtue, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... hidden sources of human joy and have neither grown old in cynicism nor gray in utilitarianism, Miss Gale's charming love stories, full of fresh feeling and grace of style, will be a draught from ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... sensual impulse: the heroic, the ideal, nay the deliberately made up, the artificial, had a charm for her. Be this as it may, the Countess and Alfieri continued, in the opinion of all contemporaries, and according to the assurance of Alfieri himself, whose cynicism and truthfulness are equal, on the ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... that smooth-spoken you might think he was after swallyin' a one of his own graisy dipts, on'y he'd liefer be chaitin' some poor body over the sellin' of it"—a perhaps not inexcusable preference. As for Peter, he contemplated humanity with a jovial cynicism, and rather enjoyed the society of the old blacksmith, despite the gruff sarcasms which sometimes made their womenkind turn the conversation apprehensively. He had been heard to say of Felix that ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... inconvenient facts that they prefer to ignore them even to themselves. To pretend that things are not what they are is regarded by Anglo-Saxons as a proof of strength of mind and wholesomeness of disposition; while to admit that things are indeed what they are is deemed to be either weakness or cynicism. The plain man is incapable of being a cynic; he feels, therefore, that he has been guilty of weakness, and this, of course, makes ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... moving; for the character of Anton, the big, honest, alert and energetic Chicago laborer, can hardly fail to arouse in the reader intense admiration, lively sympathy and not a little amusement free from all cynicism and class feeling. In 'The Spirit of Labor' we are brought into living contact with the men and women we meet on the streets, the great American public with whom every business man, every pastor and every politician has daily to reckon. Teamsters, ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... satyr, the man and the ape, are struggling for the mastery. In Socrates, the true man conquers, and comes forth high and pure; in Rabelais, alas! the victor is the ape, while the man himself sinks down in cynicism, sensuality, practical jokes, foul talk. He returns to Paris, to live an idle, luxurious life; to die—says the legend—saying, "I go to seek a great perhaps," and to leave behind him little save a school of Pantagruelists—careless young gentlemen, ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... mental vision, that no one save Madame M——, a wise lady of the formal-yet-opulent type, whom Maupassant would have classed as "encore desirable," is able to drag him to earth again, with a few words of wholesome cynicism. ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... because, Miss Roberta, beneath your cynicism and your assumption of masculinity, you are as sympathetic as a young mother. It would be mean to put over anything like that, and ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... array of the forces of wrong—weakness, blind passion, and pitiless egoism; but there is already a full suggestion of the overwhelming energy of the element of evil; and in LEAR the conception is worked out with a desperate insistence which carries us far indeed from the sunny cynicism and prudent scepticism of Montaigne. Nowhere in the essays do we find such a note of gloom as is ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... months and Louis was still at 'The Willows.' His cynicism had come to have a strangely wistful ring. John Randolph's visits were frequent and they held long conversations together, these men, the one who had seized every opportunity and made the most of it, the other who had let his golden chances slip through his fingers one by one; then ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... to the house, and the dancing continued, but Robert felt that he could not stay any longer. Such cynicism shocked him, and paying his respects to Bigot and his friends, he left with Tayoga and the hunter for the Inn of ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... sort, Mrs Fyne assured me with some resentment, as though I had aspersed little Fyne's sanity. Fyne very sensibly had set himself the mental task of discovering the self-interest. I should not have thought him capable of so much cynicism. He said to himself that for people of that sort (religious fears or the vanity of righteousness put aside) money—not great wealth, but, money, just a little money—is the measure of virtue, of expediency, of wisdom—of pretty well everything. But the girl was absolutely ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... the tongue, one feels certain that the soul of the eighteenth century was not really contented with its heroic sentimental mask. The look upon that face, with its aristocratic refinement, its deadly intellect, its beautiful cynicism, is worth all the sessions of the Academy and all the seasons of the Salons. It makes one think somehow of the gardens of Versailles. One seems to see it as a mocking fragment of heathen marble—some ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... her chair tightly with both hands. She was looking at Norris with a new expression, a kind of breathless fear. She knew him for a man who could not be swerved from the thing he wanted. For all his easy cynicism, he had the reputation of being a bloodhound on the trail. Moreover, she knew that he was no friend to Jack Flatray. Why had she left that running iron as evidence to convict its owner? What folly not to have removed it from the immediate ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... I had taken him to be a very much older man than that, and the only thing about him I didn't like was a certain cynicism and knowledge of the world which didn't look well in a man who ought to be thinking about the serious things of life. After this young Howard confided in me even more than before. He said that he didn't care for Mrs. Tremain in that ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... had hardly the strength to put out her arm and push him away; and, with a cynicism in which all his abominable nature stood revealed, Daubrecq, mingling words of cruelty and words of ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... whether she went to the theatre, and if she ever went at night to the coffee-house with her husband. And Therese was beginning to think he was more interesting than the others, with his apparent ignorance of her world and his superb cynicism. ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... His gentle cynicism left me unmoved. I had almost forgotten his presence. I was standing over by the window, looking out across a wilderness of housetops. My own thoughts for the moment were sufficient. I spoke, it is true, but I ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... based some of his most felicitous stories. But Maupassant did not use sexual incidents for the sake of sex feeling; for him such incidents were various symbols, flickering images, of life, incarnations of the brooding spirit of cynicism and scorn. We have already seen that to Fielding, for whom they were of less special significance on their own account, they were presented as assertions of boisterous physical eagerness, of delight in energetic life for its ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... The old broom hadn't lost its snap. It had swept clean the chambers of Perkins' soul—swished away the whole accumulation of nasty little cobwebs and malignant germs. Gone were the mean doubts that had formed in him, the lethargy, the cheap cynicism. Perkins was ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... power, and blest with opportunity. But he did evil in his life, and then the heart lost its faith, and hope utterly perished. The more he loved pleasure and pursued self, the more cynical and bitter he became. Pessimism set a cold, hard stamp upon his face, and marred his beauty. Cynicism lies like a black mark across his pages. At last, in his bitterness, the philosopher tells us the whole universe is a mirage, and that yonder summer-making sun is a bubble that repeats its iridescent tints ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... was due to their stupidity, to the bad examples with which they had always been surrounded in their childhood and boyhood. They were monstrously depraved. Of course a great deal of that, too, was superficial and an assumption of cynicism; of course there were glimpses of youth and freshness even in their depravity; but even that freshness was not attractive, and showed itself in a certain rakishness. I hated them horribly, though perhaps I was worse than any ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... happened to him? In a sense his words were doubtless very true. Captain Stewart—and he must have been "old Charlie"; Ste. Marie remembered that the name was Charles—O'Hara, and O'Hara's daughter stood excellent examples of that bit of cynicism, but obviously the boy had not spoken in that sense—certainly not before Mlle. O'Hara! He meant something ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... a model to his numerous successors—it was an ambidextrous trick! Green sold his "Orlando Furioso" to two different theatres, and is among the first authors in English literary history who wrote as a trader;[49] or as crabbed Anthony Wood phrases it, in the language of celibacy and cynicism, "he wrote to maintain his wife, and that high and loose course of living which poets generally follow." With a drop still sweeter, old Anthony describes Gayton, another worthy; "he came up to London ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... four-legged beast. Man's upright position has not been well adjusted by appropriate structures. Childbearing, lack of vigorous exercise, the corset, and the hustle and bustle of the early morning hours so that regular habits are not formed, bring about a sluggish bowel. Indeed it is a cynicism amongst physicians that the proper definition of woman is ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... young fellows and their fine confidence in the perfectibility of the future. It seemed to me, the more I thought of it, that I could hold on to this scheme of theirs as a help to myself in retaining a healthy freshness of spirit. "At any rate," I said, "I won't allow myself to go adrift into cynicism as long as they keep ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... Country, however, knows there is neither bitterness nor real cynicism in Solon Denney, founder, editor, and proprietor of the Little Arcady Argus; motto, "Hew to the Line, Let the Chips Fall Where they May!" Indeed, we do know Solon. Often enough has the Argus hewn inexorably to the line, when that line led straight through the heart of its ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... the calling we share. Civility is not a tactic or a sentiment. It is the determined choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos. And this commitment, if we keep it, is a way to ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... At this expression of cynicism Rulledge gave him a look that would have incinerated another. Wanhope went out with Minver, and then, after a moment's daze, Rulledge exclaimed: "Jove! I forgot to ask him whether it's stopped ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... shortcomings he condoned. He believed the young tone-poet's power was in itself an indication of high aspirations, and those he thought were only temporarily suppressed by a boyish affectation of cynicism. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... of business and the excitement of responsibility are indispensable to me, and I believe that I am never 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 ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... obvious," said Sir Nigel. "There is a sort of cynicism in the openness of the siege. My impression is that almost every youngster who has met her has taken a shot. Tommy Alanby scrambling up from his knees in one of the rose-gardens was a satisfying sight. His much-talked-of-passion for Jane Lithcom ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... self-consciousness, and the husband liked to feel his wife's hand in his. After all, a thing impossible until you are married may be quite seemly afterwards, and none of their amiable elders regarded their devotion with cynicism. ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... that all the things were in the hole in the wall, and then where was his certificate of birth? He stopped to think. But such despair, and, if it may be so called, cynicism, took hold of him, that he simply shook his head and went out. The sooner over, the better. Once again in the open air, he encountered the same insufferable heat, the dust, and the people in drink rolling about the streets. ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... same place, his offices were in the same place, and he worked relentlessly, she was told. Although he did not know she was in the city, she knew much of him, knew of his practical withdrawal from the old life, knew of a certain cynicism that was becoming settled; and a thousand times she had blamed herself for the unhappiness that was his as well as hers. She loved her work, would always be glad that she had lived among the people ...
— How It Happened • Kate Langley Bosher
... shared. Appetites, she argued, were meant to be appeased, and the preservation of game—or anything else—in the larder was an offence against the community. Now, at the age of five or so, she affected cynicism, pretended temporarily that life had left a bitter taste in her ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... a touch of affected cynicism in the suggestion that Mrs. Sterne's liking for one of her husband's friends was wholly based upon the expectation that he would rid her of her husband; but mutual indifference must, it is clear, have reached a pretty ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... the spirit of a barren cynicism does Christ lay bare the ghastly wound of our nature, but as a noble physician who can purge the mortal virus which destroys us. He has done this for thousands; He is doing it now; in these very moments He can give sweet release to all who are ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... she desired respecting the European schools of art contrasted favorably with the confused account Eugene had rendered of the same subject. She remarked a singular composure of countenance, voice, and even position, which seemed idiosyncratic, and was directly opposed to the stern rigidity and cynicism of her guardian. She shrank from the calm, steadfast gaze of his eyes, which looked into hers with a deep yet gentle scrutiny, and resolved ere the close of the evening to sound him concerning some of the philosophic phases of the age. Had he escaped the upas taint of skepticism? ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... the desire to ingratiate fought within him against his vexation, and she wondered, with a touch of cynicism, what new scheme had got possession of him, and how her assistance ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... 12,000 American, British, and French troops at Archangel are no longer serving any useful purpose. Only 3,000 Russians have rallied around this force. It is the attacked, not the attacker, and serves merely to create cynicism in regard to all our proposals and to stimulate recruiting for ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt
... passionate lament from Mathilde Maier, and a most pleasant surprise in the shape of royalties (seventy-five francs), which Truinet sent from Paris. This led to a conversation with Mme. Wille, half in anger and half with condemned-cell cynicism, as to what I could do to obtain complete release from my wretched situation. Among other things we touched upon the necessity of obtaining a divorce from my wife in order to contract a rich marriage. As everything seemed right and nothing inexpedient in my eyes, I actually wrote and ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... I forgot you were in love with her," said Lousteau. "Forgive the cynicism of an old scamp.—Ask Bianchon; I have no illusions left. I see things as they are. The woman has evidently dried up her mother like a partridge left to roast at ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... wainscoting with pike and musket-butts, splintering and smashing heedlessly. Presses were burst open and their contents scattered; chests were broken into and emptied, the searchers appropriating such objects as took their fancy, with true military cynicism. A mirror was shattered, and some boards of the floor were torn up because a sergeant conceived that the blows of ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... earnest directly, and that in banknotes,' said I; but thrusting my hand into my side-pocket, I found my pocket-book was gone. I would have persuaded myself that it was only the numbness of my hands which prevented my finding it; but Cristal Nixon, who bears in his countenance that cynicism which is especially entertained with human misery, no longer suppressed ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... exulted under his breath, "recalls me with sincere esteem and considers my services to the country as well worthy of recognition—" the judge breathed deep. What would Mahaffy find to say now! Certainly this was well calculated to disturb the sour cynicism of his friend. His bleared eyes brimmed. After all his groping he had touched hands with the realities at last! Even a federal judgeship, though not an office of the first repute in the south had ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... was no ring of conviction to his words. His voice seemed unable to assume its old cynicism, and his face had lost its former placidity. It had suddenly become old and careworn. Pain and regret, sharp and poignant, were reflected there. His eyes seemed strained and tired, the corners of his mouth had drooped, and his body too was less erect and resolute. Something had been broken. ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... with worldly desires and standards, and with those various forms of human depravity which flourish in some high phases of civilisation; inclined to simple and democratic ways, destitute of pretensions and affectations, of jealousies, of cynicism, of snobbishness. This little epoch of fermentation has three or four drawbacks for the critic—drawbacks, however, that may be overlooked by a person for whom it has an interest of association. It bore, intellectually, the stamp of provincialism; it was ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... what purpose this had been done Scawthorne could not conjecture; Mr. Percival had made no comment in his hearing. In all likelihood the will was now in this very room. Joseph surveyed every object again and again. He wondered whether Jane knew anything of the matter, but not all his cynicism could persuade him that at the present time her thoughts were taking the same direction ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... with deep-set eyes, slightly squinting inward, and a heavy jaw, an enormous man who was the best shot in the company when he cared to be. He had listened in silence to the others, his rather thick but expressive lips curving with cynicism. His only speech all the morning had been in the midst of the reception in the public square of the town ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... through some notices which appeared in the press after Miss Macnaughtan's death. Some of them allude to her wit, her energy and vivacity, the humour which was "without a touch of cynicism"; others, to her inexhaustible spirit, her geniality, and the "powers of sarcasm, which she used with strong reserve." Others, again, see through to the faith and philosophy which lay behind her humour, "Scottish in ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... the one with the self-indulgence of the other, the independence of the one with the craving of the other for approval, the absolute trust in human hope and goodness of Shelley with the blase cynicism of Byron, I think two conclusions must instantly strike you,—first, that Shelley must have possessed almost unequalled power of influence over those who surrounded him, and, secondly, that Byron himself must have been a much better man, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... reality. This feeling was merely the physical one of an amorously minded man,—he knew, or thought he knew, women well enough to hold them at no higher estimate than that of sex-attraction,—yet, with all the cynicism he had attained through long experience of the world and its ways, he recognised a charm in this fair little creature that was strange and new and singularly fascinating, while the exquisite modulations of her voice as she told ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... interfered with. And he was a most cheerful nonconformist withal. He says: 'To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer is to have kept your soul alive.' Independence and optimism are vital parts of his unformulated creed. He hated cynicism and sourness. He believed in praise of one's own good estate. He thought it was an inspiriting thing to hear a man boast, 'so long as he boasts of what he really has.' If people but knew this they would boast 'more freely and with ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... aid of pious lies. Thus, when a young lady has angelic features, eats nothing to speak of, plays all day long on the piano, and sings ravishingly in church, it requires a rough infidelity, falsely called cynicism, to believe that she may be a little devil after all. Yet so it is: she may be a tale-bearer, a liar, and a thief; she may have a taste for brandy, and no heart. My compliments to George Eliot for her Rosamond Vincy; the ugly work of satire she has transmuted to the ends of art, by the companion ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mother, 'I might have walked over their heads if I had pleased.'"[108] The general corruption and wickedness produced a remarkable misanthropy in the minds of men, which is reflected in the savage satire of Swift, in the bitter invective of Junius, in the cynicism of Lord Hervey. Sir Robert Walpole, said the latter, "had more warmth of affection and friendship for some particular people than one could have believed it possible for any one who had been so long raking in the ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... "The terrible cynicism of these words, touching such a delicate subject, must have produced a profound impression, especially since the views of the ancient doctrines were so strict on the ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... only to remind you of the 'reminiscences' of Andrieux, the former Chief of Police of Paris, in which he brags with the greatest cynicism of how he, by aid of police funds, subsidized extreme Anarchist papers and organized Anarchist assassinations, just to give a thorough scare to rich citizens. And then there is that notorious Police Inspector Melville, of London, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... "It is not cynicism, Mr. Whitney; it is the plain truth. I have always known that the Mainwarings as a family were mercenary; but I confess I had no idea, until within the last few days, that they were capable of such ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... "sex hygiene," et al., though we may by that time have enough authoritative information about sex psychology in marriage to be able to afford some help along these lines. Instruction in the ethics of married life and parenthood is of even more fundamental importance. The prevailing cynicism, the present low concepts of marriage, should be vigorously combatted by such an organization. Religious instruction would be, of course, beyond its scope; but it should be able to work sympathetically with all creeds, supplementing their teachings without seeking ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... what for want of a better word we must call cynicism in the humorous indifference with which the old philosopher is said to have discussed his own burial. Finding, as the story goes, that there was not money enough in the house for the last expenses, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... tone of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Voltaire's optimism was always tempered with cynicism. But the idea of Progress is there, though moderately conceived. And it is based on the same principle—universal reason implanted in man, which "subsists in spite of all the passions which make war on it, in spite of all the tyrants who would drown it in blood, in ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... wondered why. She liked him for his disposition; to this question as well that seemed the natural answer. When once the impressions of London life began to crowd thickly upon her, she completely forgot her sister's warning about the cynicism of public opinion. It had given her great pain at the moment, but there was no particular reason why she should remember it; it corresponded too little with any sensible reality; and it was disagreeable to Bessie to remember ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... want and privation. But it was a quite possible attitude then. Such people as my friend could never have mocked the sufferings of an individual. But with regard to the state of affairs, the pitiful millions, as an abstract proposition, indifference was the rule, a tone of light cynicism was customary, and "the poor we have always with us," quoted with a deprecatory shrug, was an accepted conversational refuge, even among such people as the clergy and ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... leaned back in the corner of the seat and looked into the far distance, while his face lost its changing expressions of cynicism, severity, gracious courtesy and keen scrutiny, and showed a nobility which Jean had never seen before. She noticed how it invested his somewhat effeminate beauty with ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... and spirited court was paid to him by many different groups of interested people who were rarely at the pains to dissemble their aims. He formed a manner for the reception of these advances, compounded of joviality, cynicism, and frank brutality, which nobody, to his face at least, resented. If women winced under his mocking rudenesses of speech and smile, if men longed to kill him for the cold insolence of his refusal to let them inside his guard, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... with that well-bred cynicism which a new school has not yet succeeded in imitating. They were of the old school, these two; and their worldliness, their cynicism, their conversational attitude, belonged to a bygone period. It was a cleaner period in some ways—a period devoid of slums. Ours, on the ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... chains. Love the immortal, the transfigurer of souls, the unsealer of eyes which in vain have sought the light which streams from eternity, thou hast come to work anew the old, old story, even though thy coming rends my heart-strings. Down, selfish, stubborn fumes of senile cynicism! I bow to the law of life. Come to my embrace, O sons-in-law; I love you, I bid you welcome to my hearth, even though you regard me as one for whom the grave is yawning! Listen how bravely I call ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... God sends into the world a man of genius that no mountains of earth can crush, and who keeps his faith and sweetness all through his life that we learn the baseness of the thought that experience necessarily brings cynicism and selfishness. There is to me in all this world nothing more hateful than this disillusioned worldliness, and nothing makes me angrier than to see it taking the name of wisdom. If I were a man with an art, there is nothing, I think, that I should ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... The new cynicism and philosophy which was thus spreading even among monarchs, was soon destined to have most explosive results. It found expression first in a further revolt against the dominion of the Roman Church. Most of the sovereigns joined in a determined attack against the Jesuits, the enthusiastic ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... fear, but with unbounded hopes of wealth,—especially hardy adventurers and broken-down families of rank anxious to retrieve their fortunes. The pendulum of a nation's thought swings from the extreme of doubt and cynicism to the opposite extreme of faith and exhilaration. Spain was ripe for the harvest. Eight hundred years' desperate contest with the Moors had made the nation bold, heroic, adventurous. There were no such ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... the interesting objects which this expedition opened to our view. There can be no harm, however, in stating that we were received by the commander of the fortress with a kind of acid good-nature, or mild cynicism, that indicated him to be a humorist, characterized by certain rather pungent peculiarities, yet of no unamiable cast. He is a small, thin, old gentleman, set off by a large pair of brilliant epaulets,—the only pair, so far as my ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Harvey had no purpose in life, save that of enjoying himself. Obviously he read a good deal, and Carnaby credited him with profound historical knowledge; but he neither wrote nor threatened to do so. Something of cynicism appeared in his talk of public matters; politics amused him, and his social views lacked consistency, tending, however, to an indolent conservatism. Despite his convivial qualities, he had traits of the reserved, even of ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... own. Wherefore, the choice of these selections, like kissing, went by favor. As to the arrangement of them, every compiler will tell you that Classification is Vexation. And why not? When many a poem may be both Parody and Satire,—both Romance and Cynicism. Wherefore, the compiler sorted with loving care the selections here presented striving to do justice to the verses themselves, and taking a chance on the tolerant good nature of ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... week in his journal, "when a person does not feel well, he should try his temperature, and, if it be abnormally high, he should go to bed, and stay there until it comes down."—"Of course," RYMOND observes, with rare lapse into cynicism, "when the bed comes down, he is bound ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 23, 1892 • Various
... have been imitated by Fontanelle and Lord Lyttleton, but they do not possess his humor or pungency. Lucian does not grapple with great truths, but contents himself in ridiculing those who have proclaimed them; and, in his cold cynicism, depreciates human knowledge, and all the great moral teachers of mankind. He is even shallow and flippant upon Socrates. But he was well read in human nature, and superficially acquainted with all the learning of antiquity. In wit and sarcasm, he may be compared with Voltaire, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... of the conversation grated upon Gay not a little. There was something splendidly barbaric about the girl, and yet the mixture of her childishness and her cynicism affected him unpleasantly rather than otherwise. His ideal woman—the woman of the early Victorian period—was submissive and clinging. He was perfectly assured that she would have borne her wrongs, and even her mother's wrongs, with humility. Meekness had always seemed to him the becoming mental ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... while she had been speaking had crept the slight mocking smile which always told better than words of the cold cynicism that moved him at times. Did she know anything? Did she suspect him? The smile masked an interest that illumined his eyes very slightly as he ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... No shallow cynicism, this! Just plain, bald truth without any wig on it. The only thing that you could put your finger on that Marie really did was so to wear clothes and so to give parties as to be the barometer of her husband's prosperity. And in every city ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... intrusion. They made an interesting study, certainly. Dr. Van Horn's face was impassive as to the play of his features, except that he smiled, from time to time,—a smile which bore out Ellen's previous feeling concerning its possibilities for cynicism rather than sympathy. His eyes, however, steely blue and cold in their expression, told more than his face of antagonism to the man with whom he spoke. But his command of manner, to the outward observer, who could not hear his ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... in externals, equality in responsibility and vocation. But this sham equality is the enemy of the true, for it does not fit man's burden to his strength, it creates overburdened, misused natures, driving the one to scamped work and hypocrisy, and the other to cynicism. Every accidental and inherited advantage must indeed be done away with. But if there is any one who, among men equal in external conditions, in duties and in claims, demands that they should also be equal in mind, in will and in heart—let ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... creed, and before any other audience she would smilingly have agreed with the Countess Cuerbo. But she pictured to herself what an effect this tone would have upon Wilhelm's German, middle-class sense of propriety, which she knew so well, and was indignant at her visitor's cool cynicism. ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... reverent selection of that form which shall be its most truthful incarnation, in words, in paint, in marble. Now life, as has been said many times, is an art too. Sententious morality from time past has told us that we are each given a part to play, evidently implying, with involuntary cynicism, that the art of life is—the art ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... strain of hardness about pretty Annie, whether bred of that cynicism in the air of which May had complained, whether it was an integral part of Annie, or whether, as in the case of some valuable kinds of timber, it was merely an indication of the closer grain, the slower ripening, and the greater power of endurance ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... life consists of the clashes between wills equally consecrated and pure. Conscientious cranks and blunderers are perhaps even more of a nuisance than out-and-out villains; they hurt every good cause they espouse and bring noble ideals into ridicule; they provoke discouragement and cynicism. There is hardly a folly or a crime that has not been committed prayerfully and with a clear conscience; the saint and the criminal are sometimes psychologically indistinguishable indeed, by which name we call a fanatic may depend upon which side we are on. We may discriminate among ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... report of sleep-walking on board would only have served to broaden the lines of laughter in the chief officer's mercurial soul, and deepen the lines of cynicism around the second officer's cynical mouth when the one relieved the other on the bridge at the ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... because he has a kind heart and some genuine instincts,' I answered. 'He has not allowed all human feeling to be replaced by a cheap mask of Pall Mall cynicism.' ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... were an allegory. When Prussia, finding her crimes unpunished, afterwards carried them into France as well as Denmark, Carlyle and his school made some effort to justify their Germanism, by pitting what they called the piety and simplicity of Germany against what they called the cynicism and ribaldry of France. But nobody could possibly pretend that Bismarck was more pious and simple than Hans Andersen; yet the Carlyleans looked on with silence or approval while the innocent toy kingdom was broken like a toy. Here again, ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... shown his respect in the most chivalrous way at his command, and she had never really loved him. Evidently women were not what he had thought they were. Mrs. Clarke knew what they were and a thousand things that he did not know. He grasped at her cynicism, and he often applied it, translated through his personality, to herself. He even went farther in cynicism than she had ever gone, behaving like a convert to a religion which had the charm of novelty. He praised her for her capacities as a ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... of that, my dear,"—and Mrs. Valentine's tone was touched with cynicism. "I had an intimate friend once, Clara Wyman, a very nice girl she was, who had been in love with my cousin Roger Benson for years. He seemed much attached to her and when time went by and nothing ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... dull cynicism of his face flashed into anger. "Elizabeth's temper,—I suppose that is what you are referring to; her temper was not responsible for what happened. It was ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... an anecdote of Berlioz extant that does not deal with his cynicism or displeasing qualities, therefore we may more or less assume that they pretty correctly reflect the man. One of the stories which well illustrates his love of "showing up" his fellows, concerns his ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... dressing demanded by her occupation. Mavis made her some tea, and the girl (who was called "Lil") prevailed upon her hostess to accept cigarettes. If the girl had been typical of her class, Mavis would have had nothing to do with her; but although Lil made a brave show of cynicism and gay worldliness, Mavis's keen wits perceived that these were assumed in order to conceal the girl's secret resentment against her habit of life. Mavis, also, saw that the girl's natural kindliness of heart and refined ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... be on innocent territory, with no human beings living on it. There was a feeling, so far as I can remember it, of extraordinary freedom and lightness." She spoke with a sincere cynicism, an easy grimness that appeared quite dreadful to Ellen. The girl looked appealingly at her, asking her not to give the sanction of her impressive personality to such hopelessness about life, but had the ill luck to catch her in the act of a practical demonstration of her ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... necessite, moi,' Herbert answered with just a trace of cynicism in his curling lip. 'I don't see any MUST about it, that is to say, in English, Selah. The fact is, you see, I'm above all things a philosopher; you're a philosopher, too, but only an instinctive one, and I want to make your instinctive ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Mary summoned Bothwell again and again. It was revealed to her as in a blaze of light that, after all, he was the one and only man who could be everything to her. His frankness, his cynicism, his mockery, his carelessness, his courage, and the power of his mind matched her moods completely. She threw away all semblance of concealment. She ignored the fact that he had married at her wish. She was queen. She desired him. She must have ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... Stanley,' said Rachel, with a fierce cynicism in her low tones, 'you don't want advice; you have formed your plan, whatever it is, and that plan you will follow, and no other, though men and angels ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... before halted him on the perilous edge of sentiment by a similar cynicism, but this time it cut him deeply. For he could not be blind to the fact that she treated him like a mere boy, and in dispelling the illusions of his instincts and beliefs seemed as if intent upon dispelling his illusions of HER; and in her half-smiling ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... and an only son, who was an imbecile. But there was something else that he owed to Lady Caroline. While she whirled with Byron in a hectic frenzy of love and fashion, he had stayed at home in an indulgence bordering on cynicism, and occupied his solitude with reading. It was thus that he had acquired those habits of study, that love of learning, and that wide and accurate knowledge of ancient and modern literature, which formed so unexpected a part of his ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... give me nothing but farthings. I try to give them nothing but drugs. Well, to-day I've made nothing. Not an idiot on the highway, not a penny in the till. Eat away, hell-born boy! Tear and crunch! We have fallen on times when nothing can equal the cynicism of spongers. Fatten at my expense, parasite! This wretched boy is more than hungry; he is mad. It is not appetite, it is ferocity. He is carried away by a rabid virus. Perhaps he has the plague. Have you the plague, you thief? Suppose he were to give it to Homo! No, never! Let ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... himself at ease, in congenial society, he displayed his mastery of irony and banter, neither hesitating to air his opinion of persons nor shrinking from admissions which were candid to the verge of cynicism. At such times he had not veiled his intense dislike of the Administration. After Hayes's election his conversation discovered as aggressive a spirit as he had exhibited at Rochester, speaking of the Secretary of State as "little Evarts," and charging the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... "Billy." Evan meant the letter to appeal. He knew that Bill knew him and would not resent perfect candor, when properly mixed with the right brand of sympathy. He thought, as he wrote, of the peculiar independence of character and cynicism of Watson; the combined traits amounting almost to recklessness. But he could not conceive of Bill's going wrong. He reflected that Hazel must love Bill, in spite of her fear that he was weak, and wondered at the tenderness of woman. Why was she so little ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... in those days, and became in course of time almost his intimate friend. He exhibited still a marked reserve on the subject of his past life: but I thought I could see that the ice was melting. Day by day he grew gayer—gradually his cynicism seemed leaving him. Who was this singular man, and what was his past history? I often asked myself these questions—he persisted in giving me no clue to the secret—but I felt a presentiment that some day I should "pluck out the heart of ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... not often puzzled. His companion struck him as altogether too clever to be likely to indulge in a silly affectation of cynicism. And yet, without this, how could one account ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... than all the sermons I had ever heard put together towards thawing a little of the pitiless cynicism which encrusted ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... course; men always did. She had known men by the score who played the same merry game, men who broke hearts for sport and went their careless ways, unheeding, uncomprehending. It was the way of the world, this world of countless tragedies. She had learned, in her piteous cynicism, to look for nothing else. Faithfulness had become to her a myth. Surely all men loved—they called it love—and ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... his cynicism, is a kind-hearted man. It gave him a great deal of pleasure to see a girl and a boy in a condition of almost delirious happiness. But he felt that they ought not to be entirely selfish. They intended, apparently, to go off after luncheon, to a distant ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... applause; uncorrupted by the tempting chances of his time; stainless in the use of gifts which in the hands of a man less true would have caught the contagion of Pope's malice or of Swift's corroding cynicism. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner |
