"Cynic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his chin to the right. When he compressed his lips, this scar, not especially noticeable at other times, lifted up into his face, became of a sickly, bluish white, and transformed a careless, good-humored cynic into a man ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... argue that this feeling of satisfaction with yourself which comes from generosity is such a desirable thing in your eyes that you want it for yourself—consequently when you show kindness and sympathy for others you are obeying the same motive as the cynic, himself, who having small sympathy for others, prefers the frank gratification of his own ego. This, of course, is pure sophistry. But if any mind is so kinked that it must reason that way, there ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... and he became such because his gifts were best fitted for such labor. For coupled with his unsurpassed gift of story-telling was another distinct trait of the Cossak in him,—the ability of seeing good-humoredly the frailties of man; and his humor, undefiled by the scorn of the cynic, proved a most powerful weapon in his hands. Ridicule has ever proved a terror to corruption. But in the hands of Gogol this ridicule became a weapon all the more powerful because it took the shape of impersonal humor where the indignation of ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... "That, my most noble cynic, is a prodigious personage. Shall birth-days and coronations be recorded in immortal odes, and Montem not have its minstrel 1 He, sir, is Herbertus Stockhore; who first called upon his muse in the good old days of ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... certainly congestion that makes night hideous with visions, all the chambers of a many-storied caravanserai, haunted with vociferous nightmares, and many wakeful people come down late for breakfast in the morning. Upon that theory the cynic may explain the whole affair—exhilaration, nightmares, pomp of tongue and all. But, on the other hand, the peculiar blessedness of boyhood may itself be but a symptom of the same complaint, for the two effects are strangely similar; and the frame ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that now ensued in the Senate showed that arbitrary rule may be readily exercised under the forms of popular government. Senator Matthew S. Quay of Pennsylvania, a genial, scholarly cynic who sought his ends by any available means and who disdained hypocritical pretenses, made it known that he was in a position to block all legislation unless his demands were conceded. He prepared an everlasting speech, which he proceeded to deliver by installments ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... eyes sparkled; whether there was mischief mingled with resentment, or whether the resentment quite supplanted all other emotions, might have been a difficult problem for the cynic. But when she tilted her chin and stared the offender full in the eyes, propping her plump little hands in the side-pockets of her white reefer, Captain Mayo, like a man hit by a cudgel, was struck with the sudden and bewildering knowledge that he did not ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... polisson, Experience would seek for it among the choice representatives of the class in question,—ay, and find it, too. Nor would the ardor of search be chilled by the suggestion of scarcity conveyed in the practical sarcasm of the sly old cynic, when he scorched human nature with a horn lantern by instituting a search with it on the sun-bright highways for an unauthenticated type of man. And yet the rowdy, like many another ugly and repulsive thing, may have his use. In the East Indies, it is customary ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... live in my house by the side of the road, Where the race of men go by. They are good, they are bad, they are weak, they are strong, Wise, foolish—and so am I. So why should I sit in the scorner's seat, Or hurl the cynic's ban? Let me live in my house by the side of the road, And be a ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... have done the heart of a cynic good to have been there; song and joke and hearty laugh followed in such quick succession that it seemed more like working for fun ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... "Menippus: A Necromantic Experiment." Translated by H. W. and F. G. Fowler. Menippus was a Cynic philosopher, originally a slave, born in Syria. He lived about 60 B.C., and wrote much, but all his works have ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... out his images with a hatchet. There was a sort of avuncular indulgence about his attitude; what he called his "preaching" was at worst a sort of grumbling, ending with the sentiment that boys will be boys and that there's nothing new under the sun. He was not really either a cynic or a censor morum; but (in another sense than Chaucer's) a gentle pardoner: having seen the weaknesses he is sometimes almost weak about them. He really comes nearer to exculpating Pendennis or Ethel Newcome than any other author, who saw what he saw, would have been. The rare ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... A cynic, considering the fact that women was the last thing made by God, asserts that the product shows both His experience ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... Austerity allied, Or clad in cynic garb of sordid hue: See him with Tyranny's fell tools supplied, The rack, the fagot, or the torturing screw, Or girt with Bigotry's besotted crew: What wonder, thus beheld, his looks should move Our scorn or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... in one of his dissatisfied moods. Out of politeness he asked the young cynic the universal ...
— The Tipster - 1901, From "Wall Street Stories" • Edwin Lefevre
... become too fastidious, or that natural feeling should be refined away. And a cynical young man is bad, but a cynical old one is a great deal worse. The cynical young man is probably shamming; he is a humbug, not a cynic. But the old man probably is a cynic, as heartless as he seems. And without thinking of cynicism, real or affected, let us remember, that, though the taste ought to be refined, and daily refining, it ought not to be refined beyond being ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... dissoluteness of those females, who had neither rank nor marriage to render chastity a virtue. But, alas! one need not visit the South Seas, to become acquainted with the possible extent of human infirmity. A cynic might, without such travel, be tempted to parody the words of Sir Robert Walpole, and say, that every woman had her price. The proposition is a harsh one, and the more so as obviously irrefutable. It does, however, read this most important lesson, that there is much ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... on. You rest if you like though; there isn't anybody waiting for you; but Mabel, she 's waiting for me and I must try and get back. She would be disappointed else. Grieve! of course she'll grieve if I'm lost. All the world isn't a cynic like you." ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... Shakespeare was no cynic. He was not unduly distrustful of his fellow-men. He was not always suspecting them of something indistinguishable from fraud. When he wrote, "The world is still deceived with ornament" which "obscures the show of evil," he was ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... who followed the so-called Stoic system made themselves prominent, among whom was Demetrius the cynic. These men, abusing the title of philosophy, kept teaching their disciples publicly many pernicious doctrines, and in this way were gradually corrupting [Footnote: Reading [Greek: hypodiephtheiron] (Dindorf).] some. Under these circumstances Mucianus, influenced more by anger than by fondness ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... they cried; "how very ridiculous!" and the little Lizard, who was something of a cynic, ...
— The Happy Prince and Other Tales • Oscar Wilde
... A little more and she would have been a bitter cynic at eighteen. Even now when she just begins to respond, like a frost-bitten plant, I am not sure ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... tenderness that were bestowed upon him. He was much away too, at first on his voyages to Guinea and afterwards on the business of his petitions to the Portuguese and Spanish Courts; and one need not be a cynic to believe that these absences did nothing to lessen the affection between him and his wife. Finally, their married life was a short one; she died within ten years, and I am sure did not outlive his affections; so that there may be something solemn, ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... some of his own expressions from a short religious discourse which the Imperial pontiff composed to censure the bold impiety of a Cynic. Orat. vii. p. 212. The variety and copiousness of the Greek tongue seem inadequate to the fervor ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Rossbach Frederick had the strange good fortune to captivate the wayward genius of Carlyle. It is difficult to understand how Carlyle, who all through life hesitated between the Christian Puritanism of John Knox and the Olympian paganism of Goethe, could have been fascinated by the Potsdam cynic. We can only seek for an explanation in the deeply rooted anti-French and pro-German prejudices of Carlyle. Frederick was the arch-enemy of France, and that fact was sufficient to attract the sympathies of Teufelsdroeckh. ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... hundred or two hundred years before, for they put a note at the end, by which the reader is given to understand, to his mighty surprise, that the manuscript was in the hands of that illustrious Heathen Philosopher, Salustius, not the Syrian and Cynic, of whom an account is given by Suidas, Photius, Fabricitis and others, for he lived in the fifth century, but the Gaul and Platonist, who flourished in the preceding century, of whom Fabricius said that he would "rather ascribe to him who was the friend of the Emperor Julian and the ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... a sudden, making up his mind, and showing himself just the man the magistrate had expected to find, he said with a cynic laugh,— ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... Voltaire, in his "English Letters," "will our philosophers make a religious sect, for they are without enthusiasm." This was a favorite idea with the disciples of the great cynic, but the event has disproved its truth. The Philosophers in Voltaire's lifetime formed a sect, although it could hardly be called a religious one. The Patriarch of Ferney himself was something not unlike ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... morning with these thoughts: I shall meet the meddler, the ingrate, the scorner, the hypocrite, the envious man, the cynic. These men are such because they know not to discern the difference between good and evil. But I know that Goodness is Beauty and that Evil is Loathsomeness: I know that the real nature of the evil-doer is akin to mine, not only physically but in a unity of intelligence and in participation in the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... life, so loving, so wise, and so helpful, was beautiful to its end. Miss Zimmern has treated it with delicate appreciation. Her book is refined in conception and tasteful in execution,—all, in short, the cynic might say, that we expect a woman's book ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... has a mistress to her eyebrow write a sonnet, Let the lover of a lily pen a languid ode upon it; In such sentimental subjects I'm a Philistine and cynic, And prefer the ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... the wit hangs his jest, the preacher his text, the cynic his grouch, and the sinner ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... replied the old Cynic, "that if you wait till you find an honest man for your husband, you'll die an ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... in the folds of his dress. His was a fossil face, the serious cast of which was counteracted by that wrinkled mobility of the polyglot which verges on grimace. But a severe man withal; nothing of the hypocrite, nothing of the cynic. A tragic dreamer. He was one of those whom crime leaves pensive; he had the brow of an incendiary tempered by the eyes of an archbishop. His sparse gray locks turned to white over his temples. The Christian was evident in him, complicated with the fatalism ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... of Heine's poems and ballads, which was generally accepted as the best version of that untranslatable poet. Very curious is the link between that bitter, mocking, cynic spirit and the refined, gentle spirit of Emma Lazarus. Charmed by the magic of his verse, the iridescent play of his fancy, and the sudden cry of the heart piercing through it all, she is as yet unaware or only vaguely conscious of the of the ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... and hate the old man, but all his ordinary tactics were powerless against this impenetrable eighteenth century cynic. If he resorted to his Congressional practise of browbeating and dogmatism, the Baron only smiled and turned his back, or made some remark in French which galled his enemy all the more, because, while he did not understand ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... as skilful as Salmasius or Scaliger, but still more learned in the language of abuse. This cynic was the Attila of authors. He boasted that he had occasioned the deaths of Casaubon and Scaliger. Detested and dreaded as the public scourge, Scioppius, at the close of his life, was fearful he should find no retreat in ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... to audience, DOLLY TELFER, a bright little woman about thirty, busied with bills and papers. Bending over her, back to audience, is her father, MATT BARRON, a pleasant-looking, easy-going cynic of sixty. HARRY TELFER, DOLLY'S husband, an ordinary good-natured, weakish, impulsive Englishman about thirty-five, is standing with his back to the fire. Sitting on sofa, reading a scientific book, is PROFESSOR ...
— Dolly Reforming Herself - A Comedy in Four Acts • Henry Arthur Jones
... pair, difficulties that need not exist if there were knowledge. That reason and love may coexist, that the beauty of life is not dependent on a sentimentalized ignorance are cardinal in my code of beliefs. He who believes that sentiment disappears with enlightenment is the true cynic, the true pessimist. He who believes that intelligence and knowledge should guide instinct and that happiness is thus more certain is better than an optimist; he is a ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... as in Asia, prosecuting his reforms in the worship paid to the gods. This, however, can hardly have been the case, supposing the edict against philosophers was as severe as his biographer represents. In that case neither Apollonius, nor Demetrius the Cynic, who joined him after his arrival, would have been permitted to remain in Rome; certainly not Apollonius, after his acknowledgment of his own magical powers in ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... could bring back to him the nature which had been his before the bitterness of betrayal changed him to a misanthropical cynic. His hatred of women was not appeased by the revenge he had on the Lambtons and O'Guires. He would not employ a woman; he would not employ a man who was married; he would not tolerate the presence of a woman on any of his ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... great reliance on the Pleasures of Memory. But, if pearls and bright shells be rarely found there, surely waifs, better than echini and sting-rays, are to be gathered on the "shores of long ago." Ah, cynic! you are strong enough to be merciful—just this once. Spare us the string of examples that would overwhelm us utterly. Does it not suffice that we confess the truth of that saddest adage, tolled in our ears ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... scenery along the Omaha road, and the shy and beautiful troutlet, and the dark and silent Chippewa squawlet and her little bleached out pappooselet, were it not for the unkind and cruel thrusts that I would invoke from the scenery cynic who believes that a newspaper man's opinions may be largely ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... what I have to say, if you weren't a model of (several, if not) all the virtues, you'd say, "I told you so!" But you're a cynic at head, not at heart, and you allow yourself to be sarcastic only in the privacy of your ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... value of Edison's lighting work, let the claim be here set forth modestly and subject to interference, that he was the father of underground wires in America, and by his example outlined the policy now dominant in every city of the first rank. Even the comment of a cynic in regard to electrical development may be accepted: "Some electrical companies wanted all the air; others apparently had use for all the water; Edison only asked ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... soul-felt tortures of a world. From the forest rose a continuous rending crash. The whiplash of the tempest cracked the tree trunks as a child beheads a row of daisies. Piled up, falling, riven asunder, torn out by the wind, the giant trees joined the toys which the cynic storm gathered in its hands and bore along until such time as it should please to crush and ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... near their throats would be too great a temptation. Some have married to avoid active service, others to pass the time. "When I knew that there was an army between my wife and myself," observed a cynic to me yesterday, "I rejoiced, but even the society of my wife would be better than this." There is a hideous old woman, like unto one of Macbeth's witches, who makes my bed. I had a horrible feeling that some day or other I should marry her, ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... no man saith. But the true sons of perfidy refined Forge theologic lies the soul to blind, Calling themselves evangels of the faith. Aretine with his scoundrels blew his breath, And in the cynic orgies boldly joined; His ribald jests had flowers and thorns combined— A frank fair list including life and death, For fun, not fraud. It shames him to be found Less vile than those who cannot bear to see Their sink of filth laid open to the ground: Wherefore they shut our ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... the great cities men are speaking to-day of the value of peace and honor," said the subtle emperor—a sceptic in religion, a cynic in philosophy, a rake in private life, and a conqueror who commanded "peace" with a trained army of four ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... was as a curfew, quenching rosy warm romance! Were it safe to wed a woman one so oft would wish in France? Oh, as she "cull-imbed!" that ladder, swift my mounting hope came down. I am still a single cynic; ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... In search of a man)—Ver 9. Meaning that he did not deem the enquirer to be a man. The same story is told in Diogenes Laertius, of Diogenes the Cynic.] ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... untruthfulness, what must the life in the family be? Perhaps the father will be living at the rate of ten thousand a year on a salary of four thousand; perhaps the mother, more beautiful and younger than her beautified daughters, will rouge; perhaps the young ladies will make wax-work. A cynic might suggest as the motto of modern life this simple legend,—"just as good as the real." But I am not a cynic, and I hope for the rekindling of wood-fires, and a return of the beautiful home light from them. If a wood-fire is a luxury, it is cheaper than many ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... years ago. He was suffering very much at the time through a woman. Now he will tell you he has become a cynic." ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... his face at the thought had become almost habitual in the last four weeks. The happy-go-lucky boy of seventeen seemed to have changed in that time to a morose man. June had left him the jolliest boy in the high school graduating class. September found him a morbid cynic. ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... "O thou whose cynic sneers express The censure of our favorite chess, Know that its skill is Science' self, Its play distraction from distress. It soothes the anxious lover's care; It weans the drunkard from excess; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... royalty presented itself in this gay court to Wallace, for all was pageant and chivalric gallantry; but it had no other effect on him than that of exciting those benevolent affections which rejoiced in the innocent gayeties of his fellow-beings. His gravity was not that of a cynic. Though hilarity never awakened his mind to buoyant mirth, yet he loved to see it in others, and ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... great wisdom of that sturdy beggar the Cynic with the long beard; for at first he abstained from lupines and radishes, saying that Virtue ought not to be a slave to the belly; but when he saw a snowy womb dressed with sharp sauce before his eyes, which at ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... nothing about books, and was one of those jeering cynics who are so common under one guise or another. Fine cynics are endurable, and give a certain zest often to society, which might become too civil without them; but your coarse cynic is not pleasant. Mr. Copperhead's eye was as effectual in quenching emotion of any but the coarsest kind as water is against fire. People might be angry in his presence—it was the only passion he comprehended; but tenderness, sympathy, sorrow, all the more generous ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... hope once more to sit, And smile at folly, if we can't at wit; Yes, friend, for thee I'll quit my Cynic cell, And bear Swift's motto, "Vive la bagatelle!" Which charm'd our days in each AEgean clime, And oft at home with ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... red cloth, with the crossed swords, the soldier's cross of Saint-Louis, and adorned, in addition, with a coat-sleeve, which had no arm within it, with a silver chin and a wooden leg. Marius thought he perceived that this man had an extremely well satisfied air. It even struck him that the aged cynic, as he hobbled along past him, addressed to him a very fraternal and very merry wink, as though some chance had created an understanding between them, and as though they had shared some piece of good luck together. What ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... and learned professor in Trinity College, Dublin, a cynic and a humorist, is reported once to have wondered "why the old Irish, having a good religion of their own, did not stick to it?" Living in the "Celtic twilight," and striving to pierce backward into the dawn, reading romance, tradition and history, I have endeavoured ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... not discouraged, but as idealist or cynic, lived on a crust of bread, sincerely rejoicing or grieving over the destinies of humanity, and his own vocation, and troubling himself very little as to how to escape dying of hunger. Mihalevitch ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... for the foe in thine own soul, The sloth, the intellectual pride; The trivial jest that veils the goal For which our fathers lived and died; The lawless dreams, the cynic Art, That ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... Dickens in making characters from those who were in a world sense undistinguished. On this position Chesterton lays great stress. It was this, he thinks, that made him an optimist. It was the same position that made Browning an optimist. It is the disbelief in the Divine image in Man that makes the cynic and the pessimist. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... schools were again and from that time forward closed. Isidorus the platonist and Salustius the Cynic were among the learned men of greatest note who then withdrew from Alexandria. Isidorus had been chosen by Marinus as his successor in the platonic chair at Athens, to fill the high post of the platonic successor; but he had left the Athenian school ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... he stood alone among his neighbors. The association between these two widely-dissimilar men had lasted for many years, and was almost close enough to be called a friendship. They had acquired a habit of meeting to smoke together on certain evenings in the week, in the cynic-philosopher's study, and of there disputing on every imaginable subject—Mr. Vanstone flourishing the stout cudgels of assertion, and Mr. Clare meeting him with the keen edged-tools of sophistry. They generally quarreled at night, and met on the neutral ground of the shrubbery to be ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... Add to this, that Mr. Fuseli is somewhat of a caustic turn of mind, with much wit, and a disposition to search, in every thing new or modern, for occasions of censure. I believe Mary came something more a cynic out of the school of Mr. Fuseli, ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... sat mute and downcast. This personal development came as a complete surprise to her. Pride would not permit her to plead her own cause. Dubois glanced at her covertly. He was still annoyed and defiant; but even he, hardened scoundrel and cynic though he was, could not find ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... Lorne," he began, "rode with Prince Rupert of the Rhine. He was a notorious gambler, a loose liver, and a cynic. And he even threw the family Luck across the ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... vacation-time." In the heat of summer the courts of justice were closed, and the more wealthy portion of the Romans retired into the country or to the seaside. Cicero mentions this vacation as "rerum proliatio." The allusion in the previous line is probably derived from a saying of the Cynic Diogenes: when he saw mice creeping under the table, he used to say, "See the Parasites ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... we both presided over Jacobins, citizen," replied the old cynic,—"you at Arcis, I elsewhere. I see you've kept your Carmagnole civility, but it's no longer in fashion, ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... The cynic has sneered at the Proclamation of Emancipation. The dogmatist has called the great Emancipator a compromiser. The scholar, with the eccentricity peculiar to genius, has solemnly declared that the slaves ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... essentially craving and insatiable. Its appetite was enormous, and it devoured too greedily for health. I rejected all guidance in my studies. I already fancied myself a misanthrope. I had taken a step very common for boys of my age, and strove with all my might to be a cynic." ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... philosopher, an unconscious cynic, so greatly had he simplified his life. Two pairs of shoes, a pair of boots, a couple of suits of clothes, a dozen shirts, a dozen bandana handkerchiefs, four waistcoats, a superb pipe given to him by Pons, with an embroidered tobacco-pouch—these were all his belongings. Overwrought ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... him," said Marcia. "He says, 'Give me either a firebrand or a cynic!' He has no use for other sorts of people. And perhaps Sir Wilfrid will help us, too—with Arthur." Her ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "That one's a cynic," said Miss Rathbawne presently. "My subtlest cajoleries never win him from that attitude of sneering contempt. The others get all the tid-bits, and he doesn't seem to care. He isn't even ornamental—he's ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... was to be expected from one of your years, you lack experience. There is stuff in you, senor, and you have a heart, which is a good thing, for the blunders of a man with a heart often carry him further than the cunning of the cynic; also you have a will and know how to ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... cliff-top bough, Like a cynic nodding there, Moved up and down, though no man's brow But mine met ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... out of the senseless conflict, and starting, with the stigmata of the scuffle still on his body, a surprising new theory that the things of the soul alone matter, and that love of honour is the first of the moral virtues. We see him, the cynic and sensual brawler of 1640, turned within a few years into a model of regularity, the anarchist changed into a serious citizen with a logical scheme of conduct, the atheistical swashbuckler become the companion ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... exaggeration in that statement? Why, we know the very names of the prelates with whom the master-cynic of the Junkerthum made his "deal." He had tried the method of the Kultur-kampf, and had failed; but before he repealed the anti-Catholic laws, he made sure that the Church had learned its lesson, and would nevermore oppose the Prussian ruling caste. We know ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... for us only this question,—whether the nature of Thackeray's works entitle him to be called a cynic. The word is one which is always used in a bad sense. "Of a dog; currish," is the definition which we get from Johnson,—quite correctly, and in accordance with its etymology. And he gives us examples. "How vilely does this ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... the Blue-Grass Aristocracy is giving way to purslane or asphalt, moving into flats, and allowing the boomer to plat its fair acres—running excursion-trains to attend auction-sales where all the lots are corner lots and are to be bought on the installment plan, which plan is said by a cynic to ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... happiness in the other world: whilst, on the contrary, such as had not been initiated, besides the evils they had to apprehend in this life, were doomed, after their descent to the shades below, to wallow eternally in dirt, filth, and excrement. Diogenes the Cynic believed nothing of the matter,(71) and when his friends endeavoured to persuade him to avoid such a misfortune, by being initiated before his death—"What," said he, "shall Agesilaus and Epaminondas lie amongst mud and dung, whilst the vilest Athenians, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... first turned towards Christianity by reading the Scriptures, which impressed him greatly. As a Christian he became the hearer—in some sense the disciple—of Justin Martyr, doubtless at Rome; and when Crescens, the cynic, succeeded in bringing about his master's death, Tatian's life also was imperilled by the plots of this machinator. While he remained in the metropolis he had among his disciples Rhodon, who in later years undertook to refute one of ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... to assume the well-bred curves of conformity to the environment of entertainers who valued him so far as to demand a series of his own lectures; but the cynic of his temperamental revolt from us, or, to be exact, from the thing which he supposed us to be, lurked in every ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... century of a dream and standing up to some cynic who's trying to tell us we're not going to get any better. Are we at the end? Well, I can't tell it any better than the real thing—a story recorded by James Madison from the final moments of the Constitutional Convention, September ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Lavater, he was richly endowed with all the baser qualities that pander to self, and markedly deficient in the higher attributes of humanity. The traits of the gourmand, the cynic, the egoist, were there; but the physiognomist would look in vain for any sign of genius or true nobility. Recognition of his undoubted rank had, of course, given him the grand manner. That was unavoidable, ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... phrases never failed him, flashing like gems or snakes and clasping his exuberant materials in almost the only discipline they ever had. Wit withheld him from utter lusciousness. Though he employed Corinthian cadences and diction, he kept continually checking them with the cynic twist of some deft colloquialism. To venture into his microcosm is to bid farewell to all that is simple and kindly; it is, however, to discover the terrible beauty that lurks behind ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... pulled contemplatively at his cigar for a little. "Do not think me a cynic," he began at last. "You are a man of affairs; you have made your own way; you should be even more free from illusions than I am. If you tell me that these good things can be done, I am the last one to dispute you. But I have seen near at hand ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... why she couldn't see Dr. Burroughs; and was unfeelingly told that there was no reason whatever, provided she started to-morrow; that he was at Ogallalla and would be very glad to see her. "Once up there," said the old cynic, "you can have Burroughs and lollipops ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... to congratulate him on this occasion; but Diognes of Sinope who was then living in one of the suburbs of Corinth, did not make his appearance. Alexander therefore resolved to pay a visit to the eccentric cynic, whom he found basking in the sun. On the approach of Alexander with a numerous retinue, Diogenes raised himself up a little, and the monarch affably inquired how he could serve him? "By standing out of my sunshine," replied the churlish philosopher. Alexander was stung with surprise at a behaviour ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... rather ashamed of our former judgments of her, and were very full of good resolutions as to our future treatment of her. Only Mary, our maid, disbelieved in this excessive grief; but then Mary is the most profound cynic I have ever known, and ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... that he had pinned all his hopes on the brandy-farmer, who had given him employment simply that he might have an "educated man" in his counting-house. In spite of all this, however, Mikhalevich had not lost courage, but kept on his way leading the life of a cynic, an idealist, and a poet; fervently caring for, and troubling himself about, the destinies of humanity and his special vocation in life—and giving very little heed to the question whether or no ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... very good one, in the sense of being valuable. Whatever your mood may be, that of the moralist, cynic, satirist, humourist, whether you love, pity, or despise your fellow-man, here is grist for your ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... if you should find that bushmen — spite of all the poets say — Are just common brother-sinners, and you're quite as good as they — You're a drunkard, and a liar, and a cynic, and a sneak, Your grammar's simply awful and your intellect ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... been said by a cynic that Banker Sanford had all the virtues of a defaulting bank cashier. He had no bad habits beyond smoking. He was genial, companionable, and especially ready to help when sickness came. When old Freeme Cole got down with delirium tremens that winter, Sanford was one of ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... of engaging frankness, which would have beguiled the most hardened cynic, he let loose upon our cousin a voluminous flood of chatter, which drowned his protests ere they were mouthed, overwhelmed his inquiries ere they were launched, and finally swept him off his feet into the whirlpool of uncertainty, ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... think it my peculiar happiness to be as it were enlarged, expanded, made another man, by the acquisition of my son; and he thinks in the same manner concerning my union with him." This is as curious as it is uncommon; however the cynic ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... against purity and chastity, appears for five hundred years after his birth. This faultlessness is more peculiar than we are apt to imagine. Some stain pollutes the morals or the morality of almost every other teacher, and of every other lawgiver.* Zeno the stoic, and Diogenes the cynic, fell into the foulest impurities; of which also Socrates himself was more than suspected. Solon forbade unnatural crimes to slaves. Lycurgus tolerated theft as a part of education. Plato recommended a community of ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... fires, Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave. But stay! no age was e'er degenerate, Unless men held it at too cheap a rate, For in our likeness still we shape our fate. 90 Ah, there is something here Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer, Something that gives our feeble light A high immunity from Night, Something that leaps life's narrow bars To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven; A seed of sunshine that can leaven Our ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... our friend the Jerusalemitish plebeian-maker[216] will learn what a fine return he has made to my brilliant speeches, of which you may expect a splendid recantation. For, as well as I can guess, if that profligate is in favour with our tyrants, he will be able to crow not only over the "cynic consular,"[217] but over your Tritons of the fish-ponds also.[218] For I shall not possibly be an object of anybody's jealousy when robbed of power and of my influence in the senate. If, on the other ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... age when the forces of character still lie dormant, and an accident may determine the direction of their future development. It is the age when it is possible for fortune to make a dare-devil of a philosopher, a sceptic of a worshipper, a cynic of a sentimentalist. ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... spirit and for very different ends do men contemplate the dark side of human life. The cynic expatiates on painful things—the blot on life's beauty, the shadow on its glory, the pitiful ending of its brave shows—only to gibe and mock. The realist lingers in the dissecting chamber for very delight in revolting themes. The pessimist enlarges on the power of ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... fine and vigorous colony. Some will see in its record of early struggles, difficulties and mistakes endured, paid for and surmounted, a signal instance of the overruling care of Providence. To the cynic the tale must be merely a minor portion of the "supreme ironic procession with laughter of gods in the background." To the writer it seems, at least, to give a very notable proof of the collective ability of a colonizing race to overcome obstacles and ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... one of the talismanic names of the Revolution, the very mention of which is like the sound of a trumpet. Such names are the precious jewels of our history, to be garnered up among the treasures of the nation, and kept immaculate from the tarnishing breath of the cynic and the doubter. ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... something like the composed gravity with which they heard on Sundays the reading of the second lesson. But as the stage-talk went on, the slave-maidens announcing themselves without delay comfortably modern and commonplace, and Pilate a cynic and a decadent, though as distinctively from Melbourne, it was possible to note the breaking up of this sentiment. It was plain after all that no standard of ideality was to be maintained or struggled after. ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... in an ill humor to-night; I should not have thought he could say such hard things. But he is a hopeless old cynic, even when he blows warm from the south; he has seen so much and done so much, and has furnished so many metaphors to threadbare poets, that he believes in nothing good, or young, or in any way fresh. He is bad company, and I have shut the window again. You asked me for a story, and you ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... and Miss Vulson, was flattered by the circumstance, and went into it with my whole heart, or rather my whole head, for this passion certainly reached no further, though it transported me almost to madness, and frequently produced scenes sufficient to make even a cynic expire ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... become cloud-capt, was a tender and lowly plant. They made themselves like a youngish aunt and uncle to him, and had him with them all they could while they stayed in Paris. When they came home they brought the first impressionistic pictures ever seen in the West; at Pymantoning, the village cynic asked which was right side up, and whether he was to stand on his head or not to get them in range. Ludlow remained in France, which he maintained had the only sun for impressionism; and then he changed ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... to be more than man." And here we have the man. Here we have the man who "did not feel obliged, thank God, to make a profession (metier) of science in order to increase his means, and who did not pretend to play the cynic and despise glory." And afterwards he tells us how he was compelled to make a sojourn in Germany, and there, shut up in a stove (poele) he began to philosophize his method. But in Germany, shut up in a stove! And such his discourse is, a stove-discourse, and the stove a German one, although ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... AND THE CYRENAICS. Cynic succession. The proper description of the tenets of both schools comes under the Summum Bonum. The Cynic Ideal was the minimum of wants, and their self-denial was compensated by exemption from fear, and by pride of superiority. The ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... certain sardonical disdain, lurking beneath the foundling's humble mien, and in Christian sympathy more distressed at it on his account than on his own, dimly surmising what might be the final fate of such a cynic solitaire, nor perhaps uninfluenced by the general strangeness of surrounding things, this good magistrate had glanced sadly, sideways from the speaker, and thereupon his foreboding eye had started at the expression of the unchanging ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... of the wish to recognise and encourage, that I couldn't turn about for the other thing. Well! I shall know another time how to value a rural neighbourhood report of the existence of a local poet. Usually there is some hardheaded cynic in the community with native perception enough to enlighten the rest as to the true value of the phenomenon; but there seems to have been none here. I ought to have come sooner to see him, and then I could have had a chance to ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... go, sneering cynic—write nonsense and fiction On champagne and velvet, on satin and sin; Though the joke may be able, 'tis false as a fable, And shows what a fog Fleet-street ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... their predecessors had tried to nationalize on Parnassus. It was a Bohemian, Mathurin Regnier, who was one of the last defenders of the bulwarks of poetry, assailed by the phalanx of rhetoricians and grammarians who declared Rabelais barbarous and Montaigne obscure. It was this same cynic, Mathurin Regnier, who, adding fresh knots to the satiric whip of Horace, exclaimed, in indignation at the manners of his day, "Honor is an old saint past ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... of those who are not precipitate! Take the case of the splendid cynic whose words we have quoted. With his usual sagacity, Lord Beaconsfield waited, watched, and finally succeeded in making an ideally happy marriage in circumstances which would have affrighted an ordinary person. All the world knows the story now. The brilliant young statesman dared ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... great change in Sabina. Her voice was cold and indifferent. But a cynic fate willed this mood. Had she not spent the day at West Haven and stood in the old store, it is possible she might have listened to him in ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... sufficient to determine me to their cultivation: for I was not, thank Heaven, in a condition which compelled me to make merchandise of science for the bettering of my fortune; and though I might not profess to scorn glory as a cynic, I yet made very slight account of that honor which I hoped to acquire only through fictitious titles. And, in fine, of false sciences I thought I knew the worth sufficiently to escape being deceived by the professions ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... under all love of playthings, there is almost always hidden an appreciation of something really engaging and delightful. This is true always of the toys of children: it is often true of the playthings of grown-up people, their vanities, their fopperies even, their lighter loves; the cynic would add their pursuit of fame. Certainly, this is true without exception [165] of the playthings of a past age, which to those who succeed it are always full of a pensive interest—old manners, old dresses, old houses. For what is called ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... edification. The main doctrine which he enforces is, of course, one of his usual commonplaces. The statement that 'whatever is, is right,' may be verbally admitted, and strained to different purposes by half-a-dozen differing schools. It may be alleged by the cynic, who regards virtue as an empty name; by the mystic, who is lapped in heavenly contemplation from the cares of this troublesome world; by the sceptic, whose whole wisdom is concentrated in the duty of submitting to the inevitable; or ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... scowl of a cynic would soften, His pulse beat its way to some eloquent words, Alas! my poor accents have echoed too often, Like that Pinafore music ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... am not pleased with the bitterness of your letters—a bitterness unworthy of my philosophic tutor of the happy bygone days at Vevay. I wish my true love to see all things clearly, and to be the just and honest man I have always deemed him—not a cynic who seeks a sorry comfort in misfortune by carping at the rest ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... the husband's great friend, unfortunately,' sighed Eglantine. 'Oh, my dear' (with the usual cheap, ready-made knowingness of the cynic), 'I've seen so much of that. Now I'm going to help you. I'm determined to leave you two dear, charming people without a cloud, when ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... novel," said the gaunt young recruit from Grand Rapids. He was a cynic who had tried newspaper work, and who still maintained that the generals did not have as much intelligence ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... of all others. For he had thought less of all the world because he had thought so little of himself. He had overestimated his own faults, had made them into crimes in his own eyes, and, observing things in others of similar import, had become almost a cynic in intellect, while in heart ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... goings and comings. The mere presence of this one young man seemed to put all the servants on their mettle. The cook sent up such meals as she did not at any other time. "Sure Sir Shawn and her Ladyship never minded what they would be atin," she said. The gardener, a gruff old cynic usually, gave his best grapes and peaches for "Master Terry"; even the small sewing maid who sat in a slip of a room at a remote corner of the house, mending the house-linen under the supervision of the housekeeper, was known to have said that though she never saw Master Terry ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... lips are hers; a pair Of eyes a cynic to ensnare, A tinted cheek, a perfect nose, A throat as white as winter's snows, And o'er ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... portrait, he exclaimed, "The original was fashioned for the gods." And we cannot wonder, as we look on the ravishing beauty of the face that wrung this eloquent tribute from the cold-blooded cynic—the tender, melting violet of the eyes, with their sweeping brown lashes, under the exquisite arch of brown eyebrows, the dainty little Greek nose, the bent bow of the delicious tiny mouth, the perfect oval of the face, the complexion "fair and fresh as an infant's," and a glorious halo of golden ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... left his mental attitude unchanged. Now when it became necessary, as in every wedded life it must sooner or later, for her to appeal to his ultimate moral belief, she was startled to find nothing with which she was in sympathy. A cynic—or, indeed, her husband himself—would have assured her that it was, after all, a question of standards merely, and that difference of judgment was natural and inevitable, and that measured by his own convictions Arthur was quite well enough. Her answer to such a proposition would have been ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... best serious limitations, and at the worst it may issue in a tragedy. The wrong knight may be unhorsed. The award may go to him of the black plume. Pitting one experience against another has gone to the making of many a cynic and not a few despairing souls. The compensative interpretation of joy and sorrow may bring an answer of peace to a man's soul, or it may not. But in this matter we are dealing with things in which we cannot afford to risk an equivocal or a despairing answer. We must win in every encounter. It ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... sure. I remember him dimly as a tall dark man who used to lounge about alone in his garden and was always reading books. Sometimes he came into our garden and teased us children. He is said to be a cynic and to detest society. If this latter item be a fact I almost feel a grim pity for him. He may detest it, but he will be dragged into it. Rich bachelors are few and far between in Riverton, and the ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... man is a cynic. He sees goodness nowhere. He sneers at virtue, sneers at love; to him the maiden plighting her troth is an artful schemer, and he sees even in the mother's kiss nothing but ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... be puzzled to understand why Dr. Wyville Thomson, not being a cynic, should relegate the "Land of Promise" to the bottom of the deep sea, they may still more wonder what manner of "milk and honey" the Challenger expects to find; and their perplexity may well rise to its maximum, when they seek to divine the manner in which that milk and honey ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... table-spoonful of molasses, in which the sweet and the nauseous are so equally balanced, that the patient is in doubt whether to spit or to swallow. I was, however, exceedingly flattered with the notice bestowed upon me by this literary cynic, as he was never before known to speak well, even moderately, of any author, except natives of Boston, or professors in ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... was going on between Dora and myself was a riddle to which I vainly sought a solution. That this cynic who charged every man and woman with immorality should, in the circumstances, be so absolutely undisturbed in his confidence regarding his wife seemed nothing short of a miracle. When I now think of the riddle I see its solution in a modified ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... grimy as his theme, Nosing the sewers with cynic pleasure, Sceptic of all that poets dream, All hopes that simple mortals treasure; With sense most keen for odours strong, He stirs the Drains and scents disaster, Grim monarch of the Dismal Throng Who bow their heads before ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the above note, the spirit and policy of the ascendant class have been just that which a philanthropist would have deprecated, and a cynic predicted. ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... through the shift of mood and mood, Mine ancient humour saves him whole — The cynic devil in his blood That bids him mock his ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... quickly followed, is a dramatic adaptation of Lodge's romance, 'Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie' (1590), but Shakespeare added three new characters of first-rate interest—Jaques, the meditative cynic; Touchstone, the most carefully elaborated of all Shakespeare's fools; and the hoyden Audrey. Hints for the scene of Orlando's encounter with Charles the Wrestler, and for Touchstone's description of the diverse shapes of a lie, were clearly ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... sadly in the years to come could it be demonstrated that, as some would have it, he deserved the title of cynic. Here is the most mooted point in Thackeray appreciation: it interests thousands where the nice questions concerning the novelist's art claim the attention of students alone. What can be said with regard to it? It will help just here to think of ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... conservatives, of undermining the mines of Nihilists till they felt like the House of Lords, this great game of dishing the anarchists continued for some time to be his most effective business. It would be untrue to say that he was a cynic; he was never a cynic, for that implies a certain corrupt fatigue about human affairs, whereas he was vibrating with virtue and energy. Nor would it be fair to call him even a sceptic, for that implies a dogma of hopelessness and definite belief in unbelief. But it would be strictly just ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... best Philosopher made out of wood! Not that which framed the tub, Where sat the Cynic cub, With nothing in his bosom sympathetic; But from those groves derived, I deem, Where Plato nursed his dream Of immortality; Seeing that clearly Thy system all is merely Peripatetic. Thou to thy pupils dost ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... then three years of age, and I have remained "bitten" ever since in the matter of dogs. I remember that little dog, and can at this moment not only recall my pain and terror—I have no doubt I was to blame—but also her face; and were I allowed to search among the shades in the cynic Elysian fields, I could pick her out still. All my life I have been familiar with these faithful creatures, making friends of them, and speaking to them; and the only time I ever addressed the public, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... with which "the poor world" has been as grievously "pestered" of late years as ever it was in Shakespeare's time "with such waterflies"—"diminutives of nature"—as excited the scorn of his moralizing cynic, Velasquez is as unquestionably condemned as is Raphael or Titian. It is true that this miraculous power of hand (?)[35] makes beautiful for us the deformity of dwarfs, and dignifies the degradation of princes; but that is not the question. It is true, ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... towards the boastful and tiresome Roman Pharisees, coupled doubtless with the increasing disposition to take refuge from practical life in indolent apathy or empty irony, that occasioned during this epoch the extension of the system of Epicurus to a larger circle and the naturalization of the Cynic philosophy of Diogenes in Rome. However stale and poor in thought the former might be, a philosophy, which did not seek the way to wisdom through an alteration of traditional terms but contented itself with those in existence, and throughout recognized only the perceptions of sense as true, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... was beginning to tell. Ukridge became uncannily silent. Mrs. Ukridge, though she did not understand, I fancy, the details of the matter, was worried because Ukridge was. Mrs. Beale had long since been turned into a soured cynic by the lack of chances vouchsafed her for the exercise of her art. And as for me, I have never since spent so profoundly miserably a week. I was not even permitted the anodyne of work. There seemed to be nothing to do on the farm. The chickens ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... questions, that is another matter. The answer is sometimes apparent, sometimes not; he will not refrain from asking a question just because he does not know the answer; his role is asking, not answering. Nor when he gives an answer is it always certain whether it is to be taken in earnest. Was he a cynic? one would say so after reading The Cynic; was he an Epicurean? one would say so after reading the Alexander; was he a philosopher? one would say Yes at a certain point of the Hermotimus, No at another. He doubtless ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... men to find their true place in the world where they might do their largest work. This, in an age when competition and jealous rivalry in public and in private life was as common as it is now, may give pause to the cynic and joy to the lover of ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... old cynic, "matters can't be mended by swearin' at 'em, is advice I often give myself, but never take. I s'pose it's bed-time. To-morrow we will take another squint at your ugly fortunes, and see which side ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... too seldom examine the financial items of a report: had any who contributed to this fund seen the balance sheet they might have grudged that so little of their bounty went to make flesh, bone, and comfort for the object of it. A cynic would tell them that to look sharply after the disposal of their guerdon was half the gift. Their indifference was akin to that satirized ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... across country, the clever rascal;" and his ethical disapproval ever, as usual, with English critics of life, in the foreground, clearly enhanced a primitive predatory instinct not obscurely akin, a cynic might say, to those dark impulses he holds up to our reprobation. This self-realization in his fiction is one of Trollope's principal charms. Never was there a more subjective writer. Unlike Flaubert, who laid down the canon that the author ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope |
