"Cynical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... clicked the machine, laughingly. "You are afraid I'm right. And why are you afraid? Because you are one of those men who take a cynical view of woman. You want woman to be a mere lump of sugar, content to be left in a bowl until it pleases you in your high-and-mightiness to take her in the tongs and drop her into the coffee of your existence, to sweeten what would ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... moment to watch the effect of his revelation of himself to Constance Dunlap. There was a certain cynical bitterness in his tone which ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... Christian Science purely for physical healing. I was very ill and unhappy; very cynical and disbelieving in regard to what I ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... the trouble would be ended inside ninety days. For all his brilliancy of a sort, he was spiritually obtuse. On him, as on Douglas, Fate had lavished opportunities to see life as it is, to understand the motives of men; but it could not make him use them. He was incorrigibly cynical. He could not divest himself of the idea that all this confusion was hubbub, was but an ordinary political game, that his only cue was to assist his adversaries in saving their faces. In spite of his rich experience,—in spite of being an accomplished man of the world,—at least ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... all," he said, "a religious community; our rites and our ceremonies are privileges open to all; we compel no one to attend them; all that we insist is that no one, by restless innovation or cynical contempt, should attempt to disturb the emotions of serene contemplation, distinguished courtesy, and artistic feeling, for which our society has been so long ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... moralist, and she would infer from my appearance that I had become a cynical sybarite." Roderick had, in fact, a Venetian watch-chain round his neck and a magnificent Roman intaglio on the third finger ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... race meetings, and of "shouting for your party" as men shout for their favourite football team, or sinks still lower to the mercenary speculation of personal gain or loss on election results, then another danger comes in—the indifference of the average honest citizen to all politics, and the cynical ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... in waiting, our cynical friend would ask. Why not go home and sleep? Because, O cynical friend, the Wigwam now is Khalid's home. For was he not, in creaking boots and a slouch hat, ceremoniously married to Democracy? Ay, and after spending their honeymoon on the Stump and living another ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... the latest bon mot that is going the round of the clubs? Mrs. Savory Beet, of Pacifist fame, has, as you will recall, announced her intention of taking up war work. "Ah!" was the comment of a cynical bachelor, "it was a case of her taking up something or being taken up herself!" His audience simply screamed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... tragic topsy-turvydom of to-day is farther behind us, so that it's possible to examine it with more 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 begin life in sober earnest, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... drawn into a discussion of their ultimate disposition, a nice problem, for other Burnhams and Forbeses were there none. "Why not give them to the museum?" she had once suggested, to the sorrow of her sisters, who hated to see her cynical side. Worse than that, she was a radical and had boldly come out for the open shop, or the closed shop, whichever was the radical one, and she talked very wildly indeed ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... to hide a cynical smile. He had good reasons for thinking it was not the one he had flung out ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... waves and the beat of spray was still to be heard, and in the manifest impossibility of quitting the place and the desire of softening him, Anne listened while he talked in a different mood from the previous day. The cynical tone was gone, as he spoke of those better influences. He talked of Mrs. Woodford and his deep affection for her, of the kindness of the good priests at Havre and Douai, and especially of one Father Seyton, who had tried to reason with him in ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... among whom, after all, he had lived his whole life, prompted him to feel that it wasn't wholly nice of Gorringe to come and enjoy this revelation of their foolish side, as if it were a circus. There was some vague memory in his mind which associated Gorringe with other love-feasts, and with a cynical attitude toward them. Oh, yes! he had told how he went to one just for the sake of sitting beside the girl ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... a pretty poor kind of business," responded Mark Heath. Old enough in journalism to have recovered somewhat from his first enchantment with the rush of life, he was only just beginning to acquire the cynical pose. ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... that it was her husband come back, but before she could clear her eyes from the cloud of snow which had entered with him he had thrown off his outer covering and she found herself face to face with a man in whose powerful frame and cynical visage she saw little to comfort her and ...
— Midnight In Beauchamp Row - 1895 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... school—the grotesque and miserable teachers, the ferocious and cynical pupils, the dingy, dusty, and ink-stained rooms—saddened and displeased Amedee. Although very intelligent, he was disgusted with the sort of instruction there, which was served out in portions, like soldier's rations, and would have lost courage but for his little friend, Louise Gerard, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... 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 ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... himself if he had not been a fool to believe their story at all, a fool thus to be made sport of by one who would relate the circumstance with relish to-morrow. This piece of nonsense, however, was as quick to give way to the somewhat cynical common sense with which, Alban Kennedy had rightly been credited as the other. He turned from it impatiently and began to dress himself. He had last dressed in black clothes and a white waistcoat for a school concert at Westminster when he was ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... opposite him. Two daughters and a son completed the family group. Louis Hildreth had his father's dark blue eyes and regular features, but there were weak lines about the mouth which betokened a lack of purpose, and the expression of his face was marred by a cynical smile which was fast becoming habitual with him. Isabelle, the eldest, was tall and fair, except for a chill hauteur which set strangely upon one so young, while her firmly set lips betokened the existence of a strong will which completely dominated her less self-reliant sister. Marion ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... stood in such dread; her timidity increased tenfold in his presence. When he sent for her and she went into the library to find him luxurious in his arm chair, a novel on his knee, a cigar in his white hand, a tolerant, half cynical smile on his handsome mouth, she could scarcely answer his questions, and could never find courage to tell what she so earnestly desired. She had found out early that Aunt Clotilde and the cure and the life they had led, had only aroused in his mind a half-pitying amusement. It seemed to her that ...
— Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... warders had expressed his opinion that No. 421 was vindictive, but he (the chaplain) was bound to say he had observed nothing of that. The remarks in his note-book respecting 421 were these: "Richard Yorke—aged twenty, looks ten years older; reserved and cynical; a hopeless infidel, but respectful, uncomplaining, ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... not a reactionary; Crystal is a child," she replied. "But what can you expect of William Cord's daughter? He is a dangerous and disintegrating force—cold—cynical—he feels not the slightest public responsibility for his possessions." Mrs. Dawson laid her hand on her heart as if it were weighted with all her jewels and footmen and palaces. "Most Bourbons are cynical about human life, but he goes farther; he is cynical about ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... take her up because they'll be sorry for her. But us lot aren't widows and orphans. No one's going to be sorry for us or care a hang what we've been let in for. The longer we stay, the longer we won't be paid." He was not a particularly depraved or cynical young footman but he laughed a little at the end of his speech. "There's the Marquis," he added. "He's been running in and out long enough to make a good bit of talk. Now's ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Whence would he have derived his sublime and tender piety, his feminine melancholy, his exquisite and delicate touches of feeling, if a woman had not bestowed them with her heart. No, the woman who called into existence such a man was not a cynical courtesan, but rather a fallen Heloise—an Heloise fallen by love and not by vice or depravity. I appeal from Rousseau the morose old man, calumniating human nature, to Rousseau, the young and ardent lover; and when ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... those great men whom we all love and admire!" she says, with direct frankness,—and the cynical Beau, who has never yet received so sincere a compliment, feels himself coloring like a school-girl. "I am so very proud to meet you! I have read your wonderful book, 'Azaziel,' and it made me glad and sorry together. For why do you draw a noble example and yet say at the same ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... out of her sight she felt astray. Her mind had spun between them a tie, of a new sort in a world grown cynical and old and cold; an affection permanent as the hills, warm as summer. Everything good in her loved Raft, it was the affection of a mother for a child, of a child ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... that I had to. If you can help me, I hope you will. You said that you knew a great wrong was being done. I have suspected it, but I didn't know, and I've been afraid to doubt my own people. You said I had a part in it—that I'd betrayed my friends. Wait a moment," she hurried on, at the other's cynical smile. "Won't you tell me what you know and what you think my part has been? I've heard and seen things that make me think—oh, they make me afraid to think, and yet I can't find the TRUTH! You see, in a struggle like this, ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... as cynical as the French. So of the husband, who confessed that at first after his marriage he doted on his bride to such an extent that he wanted to eat her—later, he was sorry that ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... certain cynical tendency to deride the value of a bite that I have decided to spend the evening with my pen. 'A bite!' says somebody, with a fine guffaw. 'And what on earth is the good of a bite, I should like to know? A bite is neither fish, ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... important or unimportant, concerning the inhabitants of Longwood, that was not promptly passed along. Needless to say, these communications relieved the dull monotony of the exiles, and even Gourgaud was driven to cynical mockery by the ridiculous character of some of the piteous stories that filtered through. There never was any difficulty in verifying the truth of them when it was thought necessary or useful to do so. On the authority ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... 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. "Whoever," said he, "hath anything fixed in his ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... then. You listen to her carefully. Her opinions happen to be of an unusually cynical nature, but at ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... influence, each one was revealing a little more of his real self. They had all laid aside their muddy riding boots and heavy riding coats, and were lounging in picturesque undress. Lord Farquhart, who was easily the leader of the four, had thrown aside the cynical veneer that had for some time marred the dark, Oriental beauty of his face, and was humming a love song. Lindley's comely Irish face was slightly flushed, and he was keeping time on the white table with the tip of his ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... erect. His long, thin face, seamed and lined, was striking in its grotesque ugliness. From under his craggy, scowling brows, his sharp green-gray eyes peered with a curious expression of baffling, quizzing, half pathetic, and wholly cynical, interrogation. He was smoking a straight, much-used brier pipe. At his feet, lay a ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... affairs?—at least a lady as far as HE knows. Of course she's some old blowzy with frumpled hair trying to rope in a greenhorn with a string of words and phrases," concluded Jack, carelessly, who had an equally cynical distrust of the ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... shocked beyond measure at his libelous smirching of honored names and hurt as well by his slighting reference to myself had I not known from the revealing editorial he had dictated what a sympathetic and kindly nature was really his and how he might, beneath this cynical pose, have an admiration great as mine for the characters he had ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... for consultations was over, the doctor's sitting-room was still full of people in search of healing. Trublet dismissed them, and received his theatrical friends in his private room. He was standing in front of a table encumbered with books and papers. An adjustable arm-chair, infirm and cynical, displayed itself by the window. The director of the Odeon set forth the object of his call, and ended ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... not go in, but walked past with his head in the air, looking neither to right nor to left. He felt as though every one must already know of the morning's experience; and he was fearful of meeting eyes alight with cynical understanding. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... answered Ezra, with a cynical laugh. "I could pick out a score of impecunious fellows from the clubs who would be only too glad to earn a hundred or two in any way you can mention. All their talk about honour and so forth is very pretty and edifying, but it's not meant for every day use. ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... did not believe the man lived who was such an unmitigated, cynical brute as to profess and act upon such principles, and I would willingly agree to any law that would send him to ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... bad whisky, but smoking a very good cigar. The whisky, of course, was the choice brand of The Champion Arms; the cigar he had probably brought with him from London. Nothing could be more different than his cynical negligence from the dapper dryness of the young American; but something in his pencil and open notebook, and perhaps in the expression of his alert blue eye, caused Kidd to guess, correctly, that he was a ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... be seen supporting himself against the pedestal of the Lion's statue, the policeman appeared to be engaged upon a new crusade of note-taking. The small crowd was melting away, but the sinister face of the sarcastic man could be seen wreathed in a cynical smile ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... woman is "colorless," because she is bleak and chilling and unfriendly. We demand that certain music shall be full of color, and we always seek color in the pages of our favorite books. One poet has color and to spare, another is cynical and hard and—gray. We think and criticize from the standpoint of an appreciation of color, although often ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... judging the dead; and with justice outraged human feeling will never reconcile itself to what Sulla did or suffered others to do. Sulla not only established his despotic power by unscrupulous violence, but in doing so called things by their right name with a certain cynical frankness, through which he has irreparably offended the great mass of the weakhearted who are more revolted at the name than at the thing, but through which, from the cool and dispassionate character of his crimes, he certainly ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... 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 the top ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... never heard a man talk as you have been talking, that is all. The rest of them are cynical and hard and cold. They would be ashamed to say the things you have said. No, no!" she cried, laying her hand on his arm as he made a little uneasy movement, "do not misunderstand me. I like it. ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... that was on the beach for hire—a perfectly sound distinction. Probably it was some commercial-minded lodger or beach-chatterer, from whom he picked up the opinion that nowadays, to get on, you must run with the hare and hunt with the hounds—a precept which he quotes with cynical gusto but carries out only so far as suits his feelings. He aims at being businesslike, but the businesslike side of his character is the more superficial. Pride will not allow him to boggle over bargains. "Take ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... I can recall that day! The shining counter, the placards advertising strange mixtures with ice cream as their basis, the busy men behind the counter, the half-cynical, half-pitying eyes of the girl in the cage where you bought the soda checks. She had seen so many happy, healthy boys through that little hole in the wire netting, so many thoughtless boys all eager for their first ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... Lewis was a student under W. T. Kirkpatrick, a military trainee at Oxford, and a soldier serving in the trenches of World War I. Their outlook varies from Romantic expressions of love for the beauty and simplicity of nature to cynical statements about the presence of evil in this world. In a September 12, 1918 letter to his friend Arthur Greeves, Lewis said that his book was, "mainly strung around the idea that I mentioned to you before—that nature is wholly diabolical & malevolent ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... critic and novelist, usually known by his pseudonym "De Stendal," born at Grenoble; wrote in criticism "De l'Amour," and in fiction "La Chartreuse de Parme" and "Le Rouge et le Noir"; an ambitious writer and a cynical (1788-1842). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the man of the world, though one would hardly believe it as one sees the cynical look and sneer and hears him say, 'I don't want your church—your Army!' there is underneath, in spite of his apparent indifference, a longing after God and a disgust ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... treated. True, he is often careless in the bad sense as well as in the good, though the doggerel of the "Sessions" and some other pieces is probably intentional. But in his own vein, that of coxcombry that is not quite cynical, and is quite intelligent, he is marvellously happy. The famous song in Aglaura, the Allegro to Lovelace's Penseroso, "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" is scarcely better than "'Tis now since I sat down before That foolish fort a heart," or "Out upon it! I have loved Three whole days together." ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... readers on reading thus far will, I am afraid, prepare themselves for the arrival of a faithful cashier with news of irretrievable ruin, or a mysterious and cynical stranger threatening ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... dinner-table, Carrington was pretty certain to help her to the one or the other. Old Baron Jacobi, the Bulgarian minister, fell madly in love with both sisters, as he commonly did with every pretty face and neat figure. He was a witty, cynical, broken-down Parisian roue, kept in Washington for years past by his debts and his salary; always grumbling because there was no opera, and mysteriously disappearing on visits to New York; a voracious devourer of French and German literature, ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... take charge of it now," he said, placing it in her hands. As he did so there flashed across his mind the cynical appropriateness of the old proverb about locking ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... and the Treasury were not confidential. No one volunteered advice. No one offered suggestion. One got no light, even from the press, although press agents expressed in private the most damning convictions with their usual cynical frankness. The Congressional Committee took a quantity of evidence which it dared not probe, and refused to analyze. Although the fault lay somewhere on the Administration, and could lie nowhere else, the trail always faded and died out at the point where any member of the Administration ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... a moment of breathless waiting. Then they bawled, "Second district!" In a flash the company of indolent and cynical young men had vanished like ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... a cynical glance, and nodded to one of the marines. The latter stepped forward and began searching the boys, Ralph being the first to undergo the ordeal; several letters, a few trinkets, a knife and a purse, containing all ...
— The Boy Volunteers with the Submarine Fleet • Kenneth Ward
... clergyman so far forgot his Bible in his rapture as to exclaim to Mrs. Cibber, at the close of one of her airs, "Woman, for this be all thy sins forgiven thee." The penny-a-liners wrote that "words were wanting to express the exquisite delight," etc. And—supreme compliment of all, for Handel was a cynical bachelor—the fine ladies consented to leave their hoops at home for the second performance, that a couple of hundred or so extra listeners might be accommodated. This event was the grand triumph of Handel's life. Years of misconception, ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... no! Merely the fangs and poison-sacks. Look here, young man! Did you believe all those cynical things when ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... even our insatiability gets sated by its lascivious melancholy!—And finally love, love translated back into Nature! Not the love of a "cultured girl!"—no Senta-sentimentality.(7) But love as fate, as a fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel,—and precisely in this way Nature! The love whose means is war, whose very essence is the mortal hatred between the sexes!—I know no case in which the tragic irony, which constitutes the kernel of love, is expressed with such severity, ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... myself), as lonely, as reckless, as unlucky, I would have married the dear young idiot on the spot. Not that my own marriage (with Mrs. Lascelles) was an end that I contemplated for a moment as I took my cynical resolve. And now I trust that I have made both my position and my intentions very plain, and have written myself down neither more of a fool nor less of a knave than circumstances (and one's own infirmities) combined to make me at this juncture ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... digressed from moral subjects, I suppose you are not so rigorous or cynical as to deny the value or usefulness of natural philosophy; or to have lived in this age of inquiry and experiment, without any attention to the wonders every day produced by the pokers of magnetism and the wheels ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... and had spent a large part of the last few years at the Manor. It was, in fact, so obviously the duty of the two young people to fall in love with one another, that the surprise exhibited by their friends could only have been based on a somewhat cynical view of humanity. The cynics ought to have considered themselves confuted by the fait accompli, but they refused to do so, and, led by Sir Roderick Ayre, had been known to descend to laying five to four against the permanency of the engagement—an ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... of a cynical cast, Party change many matters for mirth affords; But of all the big jokes, we've the biggest at last, In CHAMBERLAIN's backing the House of Lords! They toil not, nor spin? That's a very old jeer! Won't the Lilies take back seats when JOE is ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Volume 101, October 31, 1891 • Various
... Whitehall, that those graceful dancers, sliding upon pointed toe through a coranto, amid a blaze of candles and star-shine of diamonds, are capering along the same fatal road by which St. Vitus lured his votaries to the grave. And then I look at Rowley's licentious eye and cynical lip, and think to myself, 'This man's father perished on the scaffold; this man's lovely ancestress paid the penalty of her manifold treacheries after sixteen years' imprisonment; this man has passed through the jaws of death, has left his country a fugitive and a pauper, has returned as if by a ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... 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: "To Heracles Zeus gave ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... salon, known as the "blue salon," once hallowed by the occupancy of M. de Talleyrand. The window is still pointed out at which the eminent diplomatist used to sit surveying the crowds that thronged the Boulevards, with his usual fine and cynical smile, like a Mephistopheles of the nineteenth century. A little later, and one has a vision of a young man of short stature, elegantly dressed, who every day or two rides up to door or window, springs from his horse, calls for a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... not to end so simply and speedily as the old man imagined. "The Mercury" dawned on Grey Town, strong, cynical, and up to date. There were initial troubles with the Cable News Agency, but Cairns managed to adjust these, against the determined opposition of Ebenezer Brown. Then came splendid days for the advertising public, when both newspapers brought down their scale of charges to the very lowest price. ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... at some little distance in the background, his arms folded across his chest, and a cynical ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... importance to what were my realities than they did to the remarkable therapeutic claims of Mrs. Eddy. They were flushed and amused, perhaps they went a little too far in their resolves to draw me, but they left the impression on my mind of men irrevocably set upon narrow and cynical views of political life. For them the political struggle was a game, whose counters were human hate and human credulity; their real aim was just every one's aim, the preservation of the class and way of living to which their lives were attuned. They did not know how tired I was, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... obliged to you for your hopeful view of my future. You evidently imagine that I have gone in for the fashionable creed of the young man of the present day. I am not young enough to take pleasure in high collars and cheap cynicism, Miss Deyncourt. Cynical people are never disappointed in others, as I so often am, because they expect the worst. In theory I respect and admire my fellow-creatures, but they continually exasperate me because they won't allow me to do so in real life. I have still—I blush to own it—a lingering respect ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... suspicion from himself, he charged the crime upon the Christians, who were obnoxious, Tacitus tells us, on account of their "hatred of the human race." Their withdrawal from customary amusements and festivals, which involved immorality or heathen rites, naturally gave rise to this accusation of cynical misanthropy. A great number were put to death, "and in their deaths they were made subjects of sport; for they were covered with the hides of wild beasts, and worried to death by dogs, or nailed ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... selfishness. He was as generous, as gallant, as quick to descry all great things in art and life, as Philip Sidney, with more vigour and fitness for active life than Sidney. He had not Raleigh's sad, dark depths of thought, but he had a daring courage equal to Raleigh's, without Raleigh's cynical contempt for mercy and honour. He had every personal advantage requisite for a time when intellect, and ready wit, and high-tempered valour, and personal beauty, and skill in affairs, with equal skill in amusements, ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... overshadowed by black and all but straight brows, terminating in two little tufts, which give his countenance a strange and, as some might think, an almost sardonic expression. Altogether, it strikes me as being the face of a cynical yet not ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... have high ideals of law and justice," Purdy observes, with a cynical smile, "but you cannot be guided by them when a commercial interest is involved. The conviction of the sheriff would lay us open to the violence of ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... go to Fair View house!" he called across the stream. "There are only negroes there, unless"—he came to a pause, and his face changed again, and out of his eyes looked the spirit of some hot, ancestral French lover, cynical, suspicious, and jealously watchful—"unless their master is at home," ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... him. He bent forward with humorous earnestness. He had written some novels, and now edited a weekly of precious tendencies and cynical flavor. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... out of which he had to keep himself, an invalid aunt, and a humpbacked sister. At the time of our story Paklin was twenty-eight years old. He had a great many acquaintances among students and young people, who liked him for his cynical wit, his harmless, though biting, self-confident speeches, his one-sided, unpedantic, though genuine, learning, but occasionally they sat on him severely. Once, on arriving late at a political meeting, ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... the real moment came. Miss Avies got up to speak. She stood there, scornful, superior, and yet with some almost cynical appeal in her eyes as though she said to them: "You poor fools! No one knows better than I the folly of your being here, no one knows better than I how far you will, all of you, be from realising any of your dreams. Tricked, the lot of you!—and yet—and ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... not even the "Thirty Years' War" in Germany, the "Hundred Years' War" in France or the wars of Napoleon, that was fraught with more horror, devastation and dishonour; there had never been a Peace, not even those of Berlin, Vienna and Westphalia, more cynical or more deeply infected with the poison of ultimate disaster. And here it was not things that ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... had entertained any lingering doubt as to Oldham's complicity in his abduction, the expression on the land agent's face would have removed it. For the first time in public Oldham's countenance expressed a livelier emotion than that of cynical interest. His mouth fell open and his eyeglasses dropped off. He stared at Bob as though that young man had suddenly sprung into visibility from clear ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... jams, it invented scientific canning with absolute methods, handy forms, tempting flavors. And canning did not stop there; meats, soups, vegetables, fruits are now placed in the hands of the housewife "Ready to Serve," until the cynical now state, "Woman is no longer a cook, she is a can opener." With all the talk in this modern time of women invading man's field, it is just to remark that man has stepped into woman's work and carried off a huge part of it to ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... a hot protest of indignation rose to Clyffurde's lips, but this too he smothered resolutely. What was the use of protesting? Could he hope to change with a few arguments the whole cynical nature of a man? And what right had he even to interfere? The Comte de Cambray and Mademoiselle Crystal were nothing to him: in their minds they would never look upon him even as an equal—let alone as a friend. So the bitter words died ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... Lovelace's conduct, sent her husband to execute that revenge which should have been competed for by every man of heart. It will be seen that Mr. Jones was no match for the perfidies of Mr. Lovelace. The cynical reflections of that bad man on Lord Fellamar, and his relations with Mrs. Jones, will only cause indignation and contempt among her innumerable and honourable admirers. They will remember the critical and painful circumstances as recorded in Mr. Henry Fielding's ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... "capturing" another, that indeed one community cannot "own" another—while, I say, he believes all these things in his daily life at home, he disregards them all when he comes to the field of international relationship, la haute politique. To annex some province by a cynical breach of treaty obligation (Austria in Bosnia, Italy in Tripoli) is regarded as better politics than to act loyally with the community of nations to enforce their common interest in order and ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... 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 face with all ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... underwood, attracted by the odour, came an ugly brown bird with a capacious beak and shining claws. He perched near by, and peeped and peered until he made out the flower pining on her virgin stem, whereat off he hopped to her branch and there, with a cynical chuckle, strutted to and fro between her and the main stem like an ill genius ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... in 1839, appeared his first work, a novel in two volumes, called "Morton's Hope." He had little reason to be gratified with its reception. The general verdict was not favorable to it, and the leading critical journal of America, not usually harsh or cynical in its treatment of native authorship, did not even give it a place among its "Critical Notices," but dropped a small-print extinguisher upon it in one of the pages of its "List of New Publications." Nothing could be more utterly disheartening ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... other's old habits, and one Friar goes about darned because of another's rending, so the poet of a certain order grows cynical for the sake of many poets' old loves. Not otherwise will the resultant verse succeed in implying so much—or rather so many, in the feminine plural. The man of very sensitive individuality might hesitate at the adoption. ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... though there was passion enough deep seated in her bosom; she suffered from no transcendentalism; she saw nothing through a halo of poetic inspiration: among the various tints of her atmosphere there was no rose colour; she preferred wit to poetry; and her smile was cynical rather than joyous. ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... but avarice was considered one of the seven deadly sins of the spirit. The application of the ethics of Jesus to social control began to die out as humanism individualized Christian morals and as, under its influence, nationalism tended to supplant the international ecclesiastical order. The cynical and sordid maxim that business is business; that, in the economic sphere, the standards of the church are not operative and the responsibility of the church is not recognized—notions which are a chief heresy and an outstanding ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... wonder it did not make me misanthropical. My dear friends, do not forget that I had seen myself. It made me compassionate, not cynical. Of course I could not value highly the ordinary standards of success and excellence. When I went to church and saw a thin, blue, artificial flower, or a great sleepy cushion expounding the beauty of holiness to pews full of eagles, half-eagles, and ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... And Miss Parsons was left rejoicing at having said a few words of reproof to that cynical Mr. Robert Brownlow, while Jock tramped away, grinning a sardonic smile at the lady's notions of the joys ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rough and bearlike—boorish," she thought, as she remembered that the man had not removed his hat in her presence. "He called me names. He is uncouth, cynical, egotistical. He thinks he can scare me into leaving his Indians alone." Her lips trembled and tightened. "I am a woman, and I'll show him what a woman can do. He has lived among the Indians until he thinks he owns them. He is hard, and domineering, ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... Scrooge was consistent; he hated Christmas as we hate anything that does not agree with our temperament. Merry Christmas was nonsense to him because he did not know how to be merry. He was a cold, cynical bachelor, and at that, so far, was perfectly within the law, moral ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... felt the loss more than was to be expected from the hardness and severity of his character. In truth, his misfortunes had now cut to the quick. The mocker, the tyrant, the most rigorous, the most imperious, the most cynical of men, was very unhappy. His face was so haggard, and his form so thin, that when on his return from Bohemia he passed through Leipsic, the people hardly knew him again. His sleep was broken; the tears, in spite of himself, often started into his eyes; and the grave began to present ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... middle age, cheery and kind-hearted, but inclined to be cynical. He had all his life dabbled in puzzles, problems, and enigmas of every kind, and what the Professor didn't know about these matters was admittedly not worth knowing. His puzzles always had a charm of their own, and this was mainly because he was so happy in dishing them ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... interest in the matter. One or two complimentary remarks were made in his hearing about Miss Pynsent's playing; but he took them to apply to the sandy-haired Miss Pynsent whom he had seen at dinner, and only made a silent cynical note of the difference with which the violinist and the accompanist were treated. He never flew in the face of the world himself, and therefore he did not try to readjust the balance of compliment: ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the same somewhat doubting position. If he requited David's kindness thus unworthily, is it not the too common experience that one way of making enemies is to load with benefits? But no cynical wisdom of that sort should interfere with our showing mercy; and if we are to take 'the kindness of God' for our pattern, we must let our sunshine and rain fall, as His do, on ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren |
