"Cynical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... less compliant; a second time the poor girl submitted to the fascination of the man whom she did not love, and whom she had so cruelly insulted little more than a year ago; and, though Burns took advantage of her weakness, it was in the ugliest and most cynical spirit, and with a heart absolutely indifferent judge of this by a letter written some twenty days after his return - a letter to my mind among the most degrading in the whole collection - a letter which seems to have been inspired by a boastful, libertine bagman. "I am afraid," it goes, "I have ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... score at college means immediate success out in the world. And he had worked desperately to finish his education, had taken care of horses and waited upon table at a summer resort in the White Mountains. His first great and cynical shock was to find that his "accomplishment" certificate was one of an enormous edition; that it meant comparatively nothing in the great brutal world of trade; that modesty was a drawback, and that gentleness was as ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... patois that is often of varying inflections, but is always full of racy poetry, illiterate and yet possessed of a vast oral literature, sharing brains with other classes more equally than education, humorous, nimble-witted; clear-sighted, astute, cynical, not too virtuous, and having a lofty, contempt for the wiseacres ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... the First Dutch War fought with their old time courage and discipline, but the newer elements did not show the same devotion and initiative. The effect on the material was still worse, for the fleet became a prey to the cynical dishonesty that Charles II inspired in every department of ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... he employed was simplicity itself, and it is peculiarly characteristic of the man that he should have been so bluntly cynical. Though the Provisional Nanking Constitution, which was the "law" of China so far as there was any law at all, had laid down specifically in article XIX that all measures affecting the National Treasury must receive the assent of Parliament, Yuan Shih-kai, pretending that the small Advisory ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... her schemes to him, sometimes unconsciously, and grew to depend more than she knew upon his common sense and experience; for, though openly cynical of her works, he would give her what she often realized to be the best of practical advice, and his amusing generalities, though to her mind insults to humanity, had been so bitterly proved true that she looked fearfully to see ...
— A Philanthropist • Josephine Daskam
... "A collaborateur," said a cynical-looking man who had not yet spoken, "is a hackney vehicle which one hires on the road to fame, and dismisses at the end of ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... Covenant, how did the Propositions treat the cause of Presbyterial government in England and of conformity of Church-rule in the two kingdoms? Most miserably! No pressing of Presbytery to full purity and completeness, but rather a cynical acquiescence in the imperfect Presbytery that had already been set up, and a glee in not being committed even to that beyond three years! Finally, even this Presbytery was turned into a present mockery by an accompanying concession ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... thing—this prospect of peace—this end of pain. All these solemn realities that were so much to thee—this "world" and all its ways—its conventions and proprieties, its duties and its trials; how now, do they seem so much to thee after all? Cynical relative that wouldst "leave it to time"—was I so wrong, that I would not hear thy wisdom? Suppose thou wert coming with me to-morrow—hey? And to leave all thy clothes and thy clubs, thy bank-account, and thy reputation, and thy stories! Ah, thou canst not come with ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... years, in their passage, erased certain lines from her face and restored the curves to her figure—indeed, it came to be much more than a restoration!—but they could not restore the colour to her hair nor the lightness to her heart. She looked at mankind from a cynical altitude of worldly wisdom; her wit grew keen and swift as d'Artagnan's rapier; her bon-mots had a way of passing into proverbs, or of being stolen by more distinguished contemporaries. She took her revenge upon society as completely as she could, yet without bitterness. Indeed, it is probable that, ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... He had held me in this slavery so many years to suit his own purposes. He had crushed my mother to death, and robbed me of my birthright. Even before that night, I never loved him. I thought it very wicked of me, but I never could love him. As he spoke to you and grew cynical, I began to loathe and despise him. I can't tell you how great a comfort it was to me to know—to hear from his own lips I was ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... should linger, but which he could not yet leave behind. The present came to him with friendly greeting. He was unconsciously, perhaps inevitably, unjust to what it brought. The injustice reacted upon himself, and developed by degrees into the cynical mood of fancy which became manifest in ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... little aback by her answer. It sounded as though she wished to end the conversation. But her talk had stirred him strongly, though he tried to hide this under cover of a cynical tone. He said triumphantly: "But you see, after all, you admit that one is not altogether hopeless because he happens to come of ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... down again upon the iron cot at the corner of the cell. His voice became slow and had in it a touch of cynical humour. "Look here, Big 'un," he said, "the gang's picked my number out of the hat. I'm going across but there's good advertising in the job for some one and ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... Reynolds is responsible for the position and design of Goldsmith's medallion, which spoils the architecture, and is so high that even classical scholars rarely attempt to decipher Dr. Johnson's pompous inscription. The cynical English lines, which the poet Gay wrote for his own tablet close by, are far ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... heart yearned over Thorne, her love rose up and upbraided her for hardness. He was so changed, he had suffered so, his hair was growing gray, hard lines were deepening about his mouth, and to his eyes had come an expression that wrung her heart—a cynical hopelessness, a sullen gloom. Was this her work? Was she shutting out hope from a life, thus making a screen of a scruple to keep sunlight from ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... that the Cornishman went on chipping away at the ice, more and more carefully, for he was getting through the top of the shell, and the golden kernel was near, Scruff watching the proceedings in rather a cynical or dog-like way, as if sneering at the trouble these two-legged animals took to obtain something not ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... bitterness. At last the whole affair appeared in a cynical aspect to him. She had really played with him, not he with her. She had hidden all her condemnation from him, had flattered him, and despised him. She despised him now. He grew intellectual ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... 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 been hard ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... could have been more unlike than the former and the present Mrs. 'Rastus Calhoun Breckenridge. The bride was tall, thin, chocolate-colored, serious, and hard-working. She toiled as steadily and as indefatigably as her husband, and to the most cynical observer it was plain that she loved him and valued him even at his worth. She cooked appetizing meals for him, to which he did full justice; she mended his old clothes and saw to it that he bought new ones; she saved his money; and at the end of the year she presented ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... again." A cynic might find amusement in the reflection that, at the present time, the principles and the methods of the much-vilified Vestigiarian are being "made het again"; and are not only "echoed by the dome of St. Paul's," but thundered from the castle of Inverary. But my turn of mind is not cynical, and I can but regret the waste of time and energy bestowed on the endeavour to deal with the most difficult problems of science, by those who have neither undergone the discipline, nor possess the information, which are indispensable ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Professor smile with his lips, though whether at his own weakness, or whether with cynical mirth at the fate of the world, Rodriguez ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... Or, perhaps, he was only playing on the youth's vanity, for Pompeius, who was for his courage and good looks the darling of the soldiers and the women, was very vain, and flattery was a potion which it seems to have been one of Sulla's cynical maxims always to administer in strong doses. [Sidenote: by Philippus;] Later on he was joined by Philippus, the foe of Drusus, who for shifty and successful knavery seems to have been another Marcus Scaurus; [Sidenote: by Cethegus;] by Cethegus, who had been one of his bitterest enemies, ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... said, there is a fashion in intellect. The German to-day is essentially practical, cold, cynical, and calculating. The poetry and the Christmas trees, the sentiment and sentimentality, remain like the architectural monuments of a vanished race, mere reminders of the kindlier Germany that once was, the Germany of our first impressions, the Germany that many once loved. But that Germany has ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... party that was "out" for the moment plotting with the foreign foe to overthrow the party that was "in." Thus the general Greek conception of the ordered state was so far from being realised in practice that probably at no time in the history of the civilised world has anarchy more complete and cynical prevailed. ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... which followed he found himself looking into her ardent face with a wonder not unmixed with awe. To his rather cynical view of the Fletchers such an outburst came as little less than a veritable thunderclap, and for the first time in his life he felt a need to modify his conservative theories as to the necessity of blue blood to nourish high ideals. Maria, indeed, seemed to him as she stood there, ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... at first. She devoted herself unnecessarily to a boy named Halley who was staying with them. Grey had gone to London. His place was taken by a Mr. Rockingham, whom I did not like. There was something sinister in his expression, and he rarely spoke save to say something cynical, and in consequence disagreeable. He had "seen life," that is, everything deleterious to and destructive of it. His connection with Brande was clearly a rebound, the rebound of disgust. There was nothing creditable to him in that. ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... insight and more impartiality than I can do. Now we are either horrified or pretend to be horrified, though we really gloat over the spectacle, and love strong and eccentric sensations which tickle our cynical, pampered idleness. Or, like little children, we brush the dreadful ghosts away and hide our heads in the pillow so as to return to our sports and merriment as soon as they have vanished. But we must one day ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the possibility of better things, and so has a motive impelling him to abolish and reconstruct the present things. The sceptic, who holds all order to be conventional and arbitrary, is as well satisfied with one system as another. His natural course is a cynical acquiescence in the inveterate folly of mankind. Or, finding order convenient, and fearing that its true groundlessness will be exposed if it be made a matter for discussion, he advocates blind obedience ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... half an hour Ethelbertha retired from the contest, hot, dirty, and a trifle irritable. The fireplace retained the same cold, cynical expression with which it ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... lesson on their own infallibility, and tends to lower the molehills of conceit that are raised in the world as stumbling-blocks along every road of petty ambition. It would, however, be but a sorry toil for the most cynical critic to illustrate these vagaries otherwise than so many slips and trippings of the tongue and pen, to which all men are liable in their unguarded moments—from Homer to Anacreon Moore, or Demosthenes to Mr. Brougham. Our course is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... his feet. He was accustomed to natives, and a very little shook him out of the Englishman. Feeling manly and cynical, he said: "Down in the field? Oh, come! I think we might have had ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... How would HE take this terrible disclosure? He was sitting with the others, his arm thrown over the back of his chair, and his good-humored face turned towards the woman, in his old confidential attitude. SHE, gorgeously dressed, painted, but unblushing, was cool, collected, and cynical. ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... echoed. "Dear Mr. Longdon, it's the first time I've heard it. If you should say the matter with ME in particular, why there might be something in it. What you mean at any rate—I see where you come out—is that we're cold and sarcastic and cynical, without the soft human spot. I think you flatter us even while you attempt to warn; but what's extremely interesting at all events is that, as I gather, we made on you this evening, in a particular way, a collective impression—something ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... harder, more cynical. His sunny boyishness, which had effectually masked the cold determination beneath, dropped from him as a discarded garment; and the real man, the man whose possibilities Hilda Ryder had dimly presaged and had resolved to conquer, came to ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... design was to call out Browning's considerable powers of rendering those gross, lurid, unspiritualised elements of the human drama upon which Pippa was to flash her transforming spell. His somewhat burly jocosity had expatiated freely in letters; but he had done nothing which, like the cynical chaff of his art students, suggests the not unskilful follower of Balzac and Dickens. And he had given no hint of the elemental tragic power shown in the great Ottima and Sebald scene, nor of the fierce and cruel sensuality, the magnificence ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... we can 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 ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... observe how perfectly free he was from any petty feeling of jealousy at seeing himself eclipsed by one of his own men. As the boat shoved off from the ship's side I thought to myself—"Depend on it, there is something in store for Newman; he will not come back in the cynical spirit in which he seemed to be ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... colors flying, till the last column had turned the hill, and then evening came on all at once, and we felt a dreary sense of disenchantment creeping over us. It was as if we had been dreaming during the last few weeks, and now we were waked, indeed! Dominique recalled us to ourselves with a cynical smile. ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... City, like myself a bitter, implacable foe of Woodrow Wilson, in the Convention. I watched him intently to see what effect the speech had had upon him. For a minute he was silent, as if in a dream, and then, drawing himself up to his full height, with a cynical smile on his face, waving his hat and cane in the air, and at the same time shaking his head in a self-accusing way, yelled at the top of his voice, "I am sixty-five years old, and still a ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... knew when he formed it, or whence he got his assurance of success in the face of her manifest dislike of him. Possibly not until after that first important act of her life which I shall presently mention. His matured and cynical doggedness at the age of nineteen, when impulse mostly rules calculation, was remarkable, and might have owed its existence as much to his succession to the earldom and its accompanying local honours in childhood, as to the family ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... not ten seconds before the Saint also was rushing to and fro over the great palm of God. Not ten seconds! And at last he also shrieked beneath that pitiless and cynical exposition, and fled also, even as the Wicked Man had fled, into the shadow of the sleeve. And it was permitted us to see into the shadow of the sleeve. And the two sat side by side, stark of all delusions, in ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... due either for his extraordinary discoveries and inventions in our use of steel, or easily purchasable out of his immense wealth. What is the good of a peerage if it ends with your life? He was not without his vanities, though one of the most cynical men of ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... not all, for the infant, satisfied, perhaps, with its victim's ignominy, turned and looked at me with a cynical smile. I was, as it were, taken into its confidence. I felt flattered, undeservedly yet enormously flattered. I blushed, I ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... at the time understand half he said, but I knew we had made some sort of a bargain. And I thought, with an aching, unsatisfied heart, that though it might be well enough for an iron-gray and cynical old Prince, the thing would hardly commend itself to Helene, my Little Playmate, to whom I had so recently spoken loving words, sweeter than ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... He prided himself on his aplomb. It was hard to get behind his cynical, decorous smile, the mask of a suave and worldly-wise Pharisee of the twentieth century. But for once he was amazed. The orchestra was playing a lively fox trot and he thought that perhaps he ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... been arrived at, of course, by many other channels. The scandalous arrangement between the Front Benches which forced the Insurance Act down our throats was an eye-opener for the great masses of the people. So was the cynical action of the politicians in the matter of Chinese Labour after the Election of 1906. So was the puerile stage play indulged in over things like the Welsh Disestablishment ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... enthusiastic hearers. If he had said that an awkward and surly manner, no matter what virtues it concealed, was the greatest bar to ultimate mundane success, it would have been quite true, though perhaps not particularly edifying. But what I desired was not startling paradox or cynical comment, but something more really manly, more just, more unconventional, more ardent, more disinterested. The boys were not exhorted to care for beautiful things for the sake of their beauty; but to care for attractive things for the sake ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... justly admired, this last tale was severely censured, as bringing before the public eye phases of society that ill bear the light. Fidelity to life in his scenes and characters is a high quality in an author, and one possessed in a high degree by M. Merimee; but he has been sometimes too bold and cynical in the choice and treatment of his subjects. "La Partie de Tric-trac," and "L'Enlevement de la Redoute," are amongst his happiest efforts. Both are especially remarkable for their terse and vigorous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... she eagerly questioned the throng of men who came and went, paying their respects to the Governor's wife, and lingering to say a few words on the situation. Sir John Oakapple fixed himself permanently by the steps of the carriage, and played the part of a good-humoured though cynical chorus to ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... in a new light. He did not strive, as before, to clothe in words that which he had seen; nor were there such words in the still poor, meager human language. That small, cynical and evil feeling which had called forth in him a contempt for mankind and at times even an aversion for the sight of a human face, had disappeared completely. Thus, for a man who goes up in an airship, the filth and litter of the narrow streets ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... Order and Civilised Force. War also against that great unseen Hand that might at any moment swoop down upon any one of them and bestow fire, death and imprisonment upon its victims. To the ladies and gentlemen from the Mission the citizens of Bucket Lane presented an amused and cynical tolerance. If those poor, meek, frightened creatures chose some faint-hearted attempts at flattery and submission before this abominable Deity—well, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... mate contemptuously, for Cupples, although a kind-hearted man, was somewhat cynical and had not a particle of sentiment in his soul. Indeed he showed so little of this that Larry was wont to say he "didn't belave he had a sowl at all, but was only a koorious ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... affectionate impulse and blushed furiously. She feared that he would think her bold and silly, yet she had only meant to be kind, to comfort him because she pitied him. Now, she was painfully conscious that Marshall was standing near, coolly observant, with a cynical smile upon his thin lips. It was a curious fact, which Amy instantly recognized, that this master of whom so many people stood in awe should himself stand in awe ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... man been false, you had not needed to have so often asked of me that question," Mona replied with a cynical expression, and hoarse, sepulchral voice, that, whilst it seemed to vindicate herself, reproved her fellow, on whose face an air of horror now mantled, ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... the sudden recoil of boyish enthusiasm, and is none the less terrible for being without experience to justify it,—that melancholy we are too apt to look back upon with cynical jeers and laughter in middle age,—is more potent than we dare to think, and it was in no mere pose of youthful pessimism that Randolph Trent now contemplated suicide. Such scraps of philosophy as his education had given him pointed to that one conclusion. And it ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... nurse took charge of Henri in the hospital, and put him to bed. He was very polite to her, and extremely cynical. She sat in a chair by his bed and held the key of the room in her hand. Once he thought she was Sara Lee, but that was only for a moment. She did not look like Sara Lee. And she was suspicious, too; for when he asked her what she could put in her ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... motive that drove him to it as was not cowardice was a hankering after melodramatic effect, the last throb of a passion for making his name the theme of public talk, and his fate the centre of a London day's sensation. Chatterton makes us lenient to a life of fraud by the dogged and cynical uncomplainingness of the despair that drove him to cut it short; but Haydon continues his self-autopsy to the last moment, and in pulling the trigger seems to be only firing the train for an explosion that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... but Stephen's celebrity was a dressing to her wound. He was so distinguished that it was unlikely that Frances, or Anthony either, would ever have been received by him without Vera. She came, looking half cynical, half pathetic, her beauty a little blurred, a little beaten after seventeen years of passion and danger, saying that she wasn't going to force Larry down their throats if they didn't like him; and she went away sustained by her sense of his ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... only the blue eyes that flashed above her, felt only the warmth of that throbbing hand which held hers and which the blood of his heart fed. Dimly, as in a dream, she saw the drooping shoulders, high white forehead and tight, cynical mouth of the man she was to marry in December. For an hour she had been crowding back the memory of that ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... which, with cynical enjoyment, Altamont had been on the look-out, came very speedily. One day, Strong being absent upon an errand for his principal, Sir Francis made his appearance in the chambers, and found the envoy of the Nawaub alone. He abused the world in general for being heartless ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of long grass and began to bite it; Rowland was puzzled by his expression and manner. They seemed strangely cynical; there was something revolting in his deepening calmness. "I must have been hideous," Roderick ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... him as he entered, and then continued her conversation with Ross. There was a look in her eyes that was new to him, and it caused him to change his purpose. He would not be indignant, he would be cynical, he would be nasty, he would wait his opportunity and put in with some cutting remark. So, at Caesar's invitation and Grannie's welcome, he pushed through the bar-room to the kitchen, exchanged salutations, and then sat down ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... more sheltered boarding-school girls never get, an accuracy of estimate as to the actual feeling of men towards the women they profess to admire unreservedly which (had he been able to conceive of it) old Mr. Sommerville would have thought nothing less than cynical. ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... deficiences and its yearnings". The poem, he added, was written in Trochaics because the elder Hallam told him that the English people liked that metre. The hero is a sort of preliminary sketch of the hero in 'Maud', the position and character of each being very similar: both are cynical and querulous, and break out into tirades against their kind and society; both have been disappointed in love, and both find the same remedy for their afflictions by mixing themselves with action and becoming "one ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... no attention, and Roscoe went on, reminding Tom of the old, flippant, cheaply cynical Roscoe, who had stolen his employer's time to smoke cigarettes in the Temple Camp office, trying to arouse the stenographer's mirth by ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... 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 ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... Lindsay, with his eyes on the carpet; and her eyebrows twitched together, but she said nothing. Although she knew his very moderate power of analysis he seemed to look, with his eyes on the carpet, straight into the subject, to perceive it with a cynical clearness, and as Hilda watched him a little hardness came about her mouth. "Well," he said, visibly detaching himself from the matter, "it's a satisfaction to have you back. I have been doing nothing, ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... and artistic people of late that eye of the beholder has been a very cynical supercilious eye. Never was such a bitter cruel war waged against the poor bourgeois. The lack of humanity in recent art and literature is infinitely depressing. Doubtless, it is the outcome of a so-called 'realism,' which dares to pretend that the truth about ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... love, suffering continual frustration from the evaporation of emotional interest that defies their own needs; the many types of efficient workers, alert, hard, self-satisfied, not wholly cynical, yet with a touch of something that borders on cynicism, submitting almost with a secret repugnance to the mysterious but supreme bond which holds the sexes miserably together; and the prostitute woman of all kinds, out to seize every advantage from ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... cynical phase did not last long, and gave way in turn to a much more serious view of life than I had hitherto taken. The trip which I made to California with my father did much to promote this. We were absent from home eight ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... the handsome pair in their innocent confidences, and, with French exuberant recognition of sentiment, thought them the incarnation of Love. Something in their manifest equality of condition kept even the vainest and most susceptible of spectators from attempted rivalry or cynical interruption. And when at last they dropped side by side on a sun-warmed stone bench on the terrace, and Helen, inclining her brown head towards her companion, informed him of the difficulty she had experienced in getting gumbo soup, ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... great thirst would come, and then delirium, perhaps bringing visions of cool running water and green trees. He would hurry toward these madly until he stumbled and fell and died. Then would come those cynical scavengers of the desert, the vulture wheeling lower, the coyote skulking nearer, pausing suspiciously to sniff and to see if he moved. Then a few poor bones, half-buried by the restless sand, would be left to whiten and crumble into particles of the same desert dust he looked upon. As ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... are brought, and he goes carefully through them. Miss Terry and Mr. Terriss also look over the big white sheets of paper. The fox-terrier strolls up to the group, gives a glance at them, and walks back again to Miss Terry's chair with a slightly cynical look. Then Mr. Irving returns to the groups by the benches. "Remember, gentlemen, you must be arguing here, laying down the law in this way," suiting the action to the word. "Just arrange who is to argue. Don't do it promiscuously, but three or four of you together. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... in front of the cathedral was cleared at about eleven, and cocked hats and red-striped trousers then became the most noticeable feature. The crowd was jolly and perhaps a little cynical; picture-postcard hawkers made most of the noise, and for some reason or other a forlorn peasant took this opportunity to offer for sale two equally forlorn hedgehogs. Each moment the concourse increased, ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... at the bar of civilization for burying their talents, for trifling away the power which has been given them as standard bearers of the cause of human brotherhood and universal justice; for truckling to wealth and cringing before a cynical and supercilious element who, by an unhappy chance, wield some influence and succeed in making the superficial imagine they represent popular sentiment and culture. It is a crying shame to-day, that with the magnificent intellectual power and influence swayed by the great divines ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... saw it. And yet to-day I ask myself, in a cynical way, Was it only a part you had learned to play, To see ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... right, they've got uniforms, too. It's all up. We might have had sense enough to know. I bet they traced us all the way through Alsace. There's no use trying to beat that crowd," he added in cynical despair. ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... at the time we introduce them to our readers, verging upon three score years. They were dressed in deep mourning, and the look of subdued sadness which overcast their thoughtful faces told they had lately "passed under the rod." But suffering had not made them hard and cynical, but richer in grace and goodness, riper, sweeter, mellower. Each had learned to say with Asaph, "My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... of Scarron, to whose hunchback we probably owe his cynical verse; and of Pope, whose satire was in a measure the outcome of his deformity—for he was, as Johnson described him, "protuberant behind and before." What Lord Bacon said of deformity is doubtless, to a great extent, true. ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... It was a cynical crowd, a quiet crowd, a sullen crowd. Those who had won, through sheer luck, bottled their joy until they could give it vent in a safer atmosphere—one not so resentful. For it had been a hard day for the field. The favorite beaten in the stretch, choked off, ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... D'ye moind thim names! It's like sthrokin' a cat"; and the company came aboard at five dollars a head, three polite Japanese tumblers and rope-walkers, the thoughtful dog, whose name was David, and the tin-type man, who was cynical He'd gone into tin-typing, Flannagan said, so as to express contempt ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... of the town and port of Suakin might afford a useful instance to a cynical politician. Most of the houses stand on a small barren island which is connected with the mainland by a narrow causeway. At a distance the tall buildings of white coral, often five storeys high, present an imposing appearance, and the prominent chimneys of the condensing machinery—for there ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... shaven skull and body gleamed steel gray in the light. His eyes, of that startling blue-green, regarded the I-S party with cynical detachment. ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... traveler, with a cynical smile, "he stayed down here to keep out of the army. He ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... about him. Only tell him that such and such a decision was his own, and he would be sure to believe the teller. Butterwell was not fond of work, and had been accustomed to lean upon Crosbie for many years. As for Fiasco, he would be cynical in words, but wholly indifferent in deed. If the whole office were made to go to the mischief, Fiasco, in his own grim way, would enjoy ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... courts of England and France, nobles and knights and ladies, met on the famous "field of the Cloth of Gold". Jousts and feastings were the order of the day. Wolsey understood how to impress the popular imagination; and he had a magnificent scorn or a cynical contempt for the enmities and jealousies aroused, of which he himself, as responsible for all the arrangements, became the centre. It may be doubted, however, whether any great goodwill between the two nations was born of all the ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... no longer avails in these days of cynical disbelief in the motives of political orators. But this young man who stood there was sincerity incarnate. The wonderful and mystic magnetic quality which wins men and inspires confidence radiated from him. And every now and then, as he glanced up at one face in the gallery his ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... present, pooh-poohed the whole idea, especially the suggestion that his face should appear, but someone present having suggested Alcibiades, probably not seriously as a proper type, that seemed to strike Barlow's sense of humour. That reckless classic scapegrace to his cynical fancy perhaps might pass, he might be Alcibiades, but who should be the dog? Alcibiades had a dog whose misfortune in losing his tail has been transmitted through centuries by the pen of Plutarch. "Who ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... you to promise, boy." A whimsical, half-cynical smile touched Leroy's eyes. "You see, after living like a devil for thirty years, I want to die like ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... everything. In the most delicate situation she could so well maintain a woman's dignity, while side by side she displayed a maiden's innocence. When his comrades were at the table, Topandy strove always by ambiguous jokes, delivered in his cynical, good humor, to bring a blush to the cheeks of the girls, who were obliged to do the honors at table; on such occasions Czipra noisily called him to order, while Melanie cleverly and spiritedly avoided the arrow-point ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... has 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 ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... State Land Boards, water rights, flood water, ditches, laterals, subsoil and seepage, the rotation of crops and general productiveness until even the cynical politician who controlled the negro vote in his ward began to realize that it was a liberal education merely to know Andy P. Symes, not to mention the distinction of being associated with ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... pinafore-thing sets it off, and that wing-bonnet—you field-girls should never wear those bonnets if you wish to keep out of danger." He regarded her silently for a few moments, and with a short cynical laugh resumed: "I believe that if the bachelor-apostle, whose deputy I thought I was, had been tempted by such a pretty face, he would have let go the plough for her ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... the best and most famous of English political economists, who knows existing conditions and has doubtless a clear insight into the movement of bourgeois society, a pupil of the cynical Ricardo,[9] ventured at a public lecture, amidst applause, to apply to political economy what Bacon said of philosophy: "The man who with true and untiring wisdom suspends his judgment, who progresses gradually, surmounting one after the other the obstacles which impede like mountains the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... His cynical, indifferent air had disappeared. He was gay, anticipatory, as if he were going to something that he liked very much. The close-set eyes were full of light, and the thin lips ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... optional with the individual, for each lies in character, and is not a matter of possessions or external conditions. To become cynical, despondent, indifferent, is failure, and one has no moral right to fall to that level. Associations that induce these feelings should be abandoned. The happy conditions of life are to be had on the same terms. The fretful, ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... Stanislaus. He for some time led a restless life about Europe—visiting Italy, Sicily, Malta, and the south of Spain; troubled with attacks of rheumatism, gout, and the effects of a "Hungarian fever." He had become more and more cynical and irascible, and had more than one "affair of honor," in one of which he killed his antagonist. His splenetic feelings, as well as his political sentiments, were occasionally vented in severe attacks upon the ministry, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... because, while awaiting his turn to go to the confessional one Good Friday, he carved a figure of the Christ from a stick of wood. The impiety evidenced by that figure was too flagrant not to draw down chastisement on the artist. He had actually had the hardihood to place that decidedly cynical image on ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... about as before, peppery, kind-hearted, perhaps a little harder and more cynical than before, but a very popular personage in Worcestershire. Those who knew him best thought him the most altered, and said that although he appeared to bear the blow lightly he felt deeply at heart ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... hand to help should the troubled girl need his help. He had no desire to take active part in the demonstration. As he came near he heard Beasley's voice, and the very sound of it jarred unpleasantly on his ears. The man was talking in that half-cynical fashion which was never without an added venom ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Johnson's letters, in which he wrote—at all events she says he wrote:—'Poor B——i! do not quarrel with him; to neglect him a little will be sufficient. He means only to be frank, and manly, and independent, and perhaps, as you say, a little wise. To be frank he thinks is to be cynical, and to be independent is to be rude. Forgive him, dearest lady, the rather because of his misbehaviour I am afraid he learnt part of me. I hope to set him hereafter a better example.' Piozzi Letters, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... his hat and turned to leave as Gerald disappeared. "Pray don't let me detain you from the interesting ceremony, Miss Lane," he said, with his most cynical and mocking voice; "Miss Vernor as high-priestess will be worth ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... guests laughed heartily and lavished praises on Hetty's talent and beauty. Only a few looked shocked, and shook their heads, saying it was sad to see a child so precocious and cynical. ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... for my cynical mirth," he said, "but I must say he doesn't look it. I was prepared for any characterization but that. He looks like a powerful son of the Renaissance, who might have lived in that one little vacation of the soul after ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... historical, but so probable that you're sure they must have happened. He'd reason it out by philosophy first, and feel it was a triumph of mind over matter. Perhaps his chuckles when he saw the result were the origin of the term 'a cynical laugh'. The children in the picture looked so exactly like pieces of rolled pastry when the ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... Karl Kastner, more cynical, coolly preached the autocracy of the worker; told his listeners frankly that there would always be masters and servants in the world, and asked them which they preferred ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... every nook and corner. These wise persons speak with an air of positiveness, and doubtless ought to know whereof they affirm. Hath not a Bostonian eyes? And doth he not cross the Common every day? But it is proverbially hard to prove a negative; and some of us, with no thought of being cynical, have ceased to put unqualified trust in other people's eyesight,—especially since we have found our own to fall a little short of absolute infallibility. My own vision, by the way, is reasonably good, if I may say so; at any ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... up Memories of old Times, hath made me somewhat cynical, I think. I cannot but call to Mind her many ill Turns. 'Twas shortly after the Rupture of Anne's Match with John Herring. Poor Nan had over-reckoned on her own Strength of Mind, when she promised ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... too cynical this morning, and it would serve you just right if you go and get some coffee for yourself, and meet with the same disaster that overtook the unfortunate steward. Only you are forewarned that you shall have neither sympathy ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... we have no doubt all these are the initials of real persons, and that her ladyship is as familiar with the blood royal and the aristocracy of Europe, as "maids of fifteen are with puppy-dogs;" but the world, my dear Lady Morgan—an ill-natured, sour, cynical, and suspicious world, envious of your glory, will be apt to call it nil fudge, blarney, or blatherum-skite, as they say in your country; especially when it is observed that you always give the names of the illustrious ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 403, December 5, 1829 • Various
... was more self-conscious, had a more glib way of expressing his convictions, but even he hid his purpose in the war under a covering of irony and cynical jests. It was the spirit of the old city and the pride of it which helped him to suffer, and in his daydreams was the clanging of 'buses from Charing Cross to the Bank, the lights of the embankment reflected in the dark river, the back yard where he had kept his bicycle, or the suburban garden where ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... On the day after my husband turned our unhappy child out of the house, Daubrecq sent us a most cynical letter in which he revealed the odious part which he had played and the machinations by which he had succeeded in depraving our son. And he went on to say, 'The reformatory, one of these days... Later on, the assize-court ... And then, let us ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... Homer[28] held the Greeks in view; Solid, tho' rough, yet incorrect as new. Lucilius, warm'd with more than mortal flame Rose next[29], and held a torch to ev'ry shame. See stern Menippus, cynical, unclean; And Grecian Cento's, mannerly obscene. Add the last efforts of Pacuvius' rage, And the chaste ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... sensible; what is worse, it is not to my mind respectable. Do not imagine that I object to humour in conversation. That is a very different thing. I have made humourous remarks myself before now, mostly of rather a cynical and sarcastic kind. ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... is. I doubt even if Jerry has kissed her. To Marcia men are merely so much material for experimentation. She has a reputation for heartlessness. I'm not sure that she isn't heartless. It's a great pity. She's very young, but she's already devoured with hypercriticism. She's cynical, a philanderer. You can't tamper with a passion the way Marcia has done without doing it an injury. You see, I'm speaking frankly. I don't quite understand why, ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... him to her. You don't perhaps know Rameau, editor of the Sens Commun—writes poems and criticisms. They say he is a Red Republican, but De Mauleon keeps truculent French politics subdued if not suppressed in his cynical journal. Somebody told me that the Cicogna is very much in love with Rameau; certainly he has a handsome face of his own, and that is the reason why she was so rude to the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cast her beautiful eyes, with an expression of astonishment she could not conceal, at the distinguished youth who thus suddenly appeared in the midst of insolent carmen, brutal policemen, and all the cynical amateurs of a mob. Public opinion in the Poultry was against her; her coachman's wig had excited derision; the footmen had given themselves airs; there was a strong feeling against the shortcoats. As for the lady, ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... time Shakespeare was read for the beauty of his poetry, and enjoyed without pedantry and with some imagination. The less usual and more cynical of his plays, such as Troilus, and Cressida, Measure for Measure and Timon of Athens, will be found to contain some very interesting commentaries ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... that the person presenting a five-pound note at a post-office should be required to endorse it; and, in defending this momentous change, he remarked that he himself had endorsed many such notes, "but never with my own name." For a moment Members were startled by this cynical admission of something which seemed to their half-awakened intelligence very like a confession of forgery. But the POSTMASTER-GENERAL soon put them to sleep again, and by nine o'clock had got his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 13, 1917 • Various
... success, he could not forget the bitter years of failure and disappointment which had gone before, and though his novels were full of genius they were pervaded by an undertone of sarcasm, so that people after reading them were more ready than before to take cynical views ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... 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 plea of her beauty: ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... money-bags, which he had resolved to empty in law against him, Audley then in office in the court of wards, with a sarcastic grin, asked "Whether the bags had any bottom?" "Ay!" replied the exulting possessor, striking them. "In that case, I care not," retorted the cynical officer of the court of wards; "for in this court I have a constant spring; and I cannot spend in other courts more than I gain in this." He had at once the meanness which would evade the law, and the spirit ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... together, as the beginning of a long yarn. The second is entirely mine; and I think it rather unfair on the young man to couple his name with so infamous a work. Above all, as you had not read the two last chapters, which seem to me the most ugly and cynical of all. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
