Cynicism Quotes

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

Sidney J. Harris

Cynicism is humour in ill health.

H.G.Wells

Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.

Bertrand Russell

A cynic is a man who when he smells flowers looks around for a coffin.

H.L. Mencken

Cynicism - the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence.

Russell Lynes

Cynicism is that blackguard defect of vision which compels us to see the world as it is instead of as it should be.

Ambrose Bierce

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb's feathers.

George Meredith

There is nothing to which men while they have food and drink cannot reconcile themselves.

George Santayana

It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.

Brendan Behan

Watch what people are cynical about and one can often discover what they lack.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs.

Kenneth Clark

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

Lillian Hellman

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde

The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl vigilant in darkness and blind to light mousing for vermin and never seeing noble game. The cynic puts all human actions into two classes - openly bad and secretly bad.

Henry Ward Beecher

It is the curse of the competent―not to be called upon.

Robert Priest

Out of the mouths of babes comes only bubbles. Out of the mouths of men like me, only babble.

Warren Eyster

He had a look of composed dissatisfaction, as if he understood life thoroughly.

Flannery O'Connor

What good is ye world when ye canst not livest hither.

K Hari Kumar

If you try to convert someone, it will never be toeffect his salvation but to make him suffer like yourself,to be sure he is exposed to the same ordeals andendures them with the same impatience. You keepwatch, you pray, you agonize-provided he does too,sighing, groaning, beset by the same tortures that areracking you. Intolerance is the work of ravaged soulswhose faith comes down to a more or less deliberatetorment they would like to see generalized, instituted.The happiness of others never having been a motiveor principle of action, it is invoked only to appeaseconscience or to parade noble excuses: whenever wedetermine upon an action, the impulse leading to itand forcing us to complete it is almost always inadmissible.No one saves anyone; for we save only ourselves,and do so all the better if we disguise asconvictions the misery we want to share, to lavish onothers. However glamorous its appearances, proselytismnonetheless derives from a suspect generosity,worse in its effects than a patent aggression. No oneis willing to endure alone the discipline he may evenhave assented to, nor the yoke he has shouldered.Vindication reverberates beneath the missionary'sbonhomie, the apostle's joy. We convert not to liberatebut to enchain.Once someone is shackled by a certainty, he enviesyour vague opinions, your resistance to dogmas orslogans, your blissful incapacity to commit yourself.

Emil M. Cioran

If grass grows and withers, it can only mean that it is part of a greater thing, which is even more real; not that the grass is less real than it looks. St. Thomas (Aquinas) has a really logical right to say, in the words of the modern mystic, A. E.: "I begin by the grass to be bound again to the Lord.

G.K. Chesterton

Can you ever "solve" disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no. All you can hope for is to make them manageable enough to allow people to get on with their lives. That's not cynicism, that's maturity.

Max Brooks

Oh yes, he's seen the black pupils of time's eyes. Two dark drains in a pair of dirty gas station bathroom sinks. The faucet's open and he's gurgling down the pipes, gushing toward whatever tank he's bound to swirl around in for the rest of his life. There's no telling from here if that's a realm of purification or of shit. There's only one way to find out, and that's to ride it all the way down.

Patrick Bryant

[Rinda] often worried how she might make the coward she saw [in Remus] into a brave warrior, and someday, a king -- a task which she felt was her responsibility. Rinda had not yet realized that sometimes courage is the same thing as folly and that sometimes a skepticism bordering on her blindness to her brother's strengths was a result of her own sensitivity.

Kaoru Kurimoto

The increasingly cynical court thought Arthur, "hypocritical, as all decent men must be if you assume decency cannot exist.

T.H. White

cynicism springs from disappointments in love.

Marty Rubin

Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony.

Thomas Hardy

Cronkite was always one step short of disillusionment.

Douglas Brinkley

In theory man is put at the center of everything but in practice he is barely allowed to sit on the sidelines

Bangambiki Habyarimana

How tolerable misfortunes appear when they affect only other people! How strong the human body seems when it's another man's flesh that bleeds! How easy it is to look death in the face when it's another man's turn!

Irène Némirovsky

You are not a better or wiser person simply because you’ve ceased to care.

Clifford Cohen

I can't bear the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.

A.J. Liebling

Cynicism, like gullibility, is a symptom of underdeveloped critical faculties.

Jamie Whyte

Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic

James Branch Cabell

Recognising clichés is a sign of aging.

Indu Muralidharan

I'm getting old, thought Eileen Calder. Old and worn out and cynical. And being cynical is a lot worse than being old or worn out.

Charles Sheffield

I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naive and romantic and idealistic - the part of you that you treasure most - to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact?

Kenneth Cain

...[we] has left nothing durable to signalize his stay upon this planet.[we]eventually dies to the honest regret of [our] associates.

James Branch Cabell

Cynicism may help us create simpler storylines with good guys and bad guys, but it doesn't make us any better at telling the truth, which is that most of us are a frightening mix of good and evil, sinner and saint.

Rachel Held Evans

Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worst than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing.

Peter Watts

It's true that Thomas was a doubter, but he was not a cynic, and that's an important distinction. Cynics often look for reasons not to believe and won't be moved by something beautiful—just to make a point—even if it's staring them down. Thomas wasn't a cynic, he was a hopeful doubter; he'd believe if he could.

Jonathan Martin

Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.

Mark Fisher

I think this goes more to the idea of 'relentless irony' than 'divine providence.

Donna Tartt

You see, cancer is simply nature's way of making you want to die.'Tatsu.

Barry Eisler

A man may have ‘his moment,’ and that moment endure for decades, or only for the few seconds it takes for a bullet to travel across a courtyard to the balcony upon which he stands as he exhorts his people to follow him.

Ralph E. Vaughan

Within he felt that faint stirring of derision for the whole business of life which is the salt of the American mentality. Outwardly they are sentimental and enthusiastic and inwardly they are profoundly cynical.

H.G.Wells

It's nice to be able to do things for other people, isn't it?That's why it's fun to talk in the third person sometimes.

Patrick Bryant

They tugged plans and ambitions out their asses and held tight to the first that didn't smell so strongly of shit.

Patrick Bryant

Preferring the nausea of the path to its fated and certain ending.

Patrick Bryant

We are literally in the heart of Jesus," he said."I thought we were in a church basement, but we are literally in the heart of Jesus.""Someone should tell Jesus," I said. "I mean, it's gotta be dangerous, storing children with cancer in your heart.

John Green

Nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, and orgasm.

Doris Block

Cynicism is one of the terrible obstacles to progress.

Bryant McGill

His age was indeterminate. But in cynicism and general world weariness, which is a sort of carbon dating of the personality, he was about seven thousand years old.

Terry Pratchett

The author describes the critic within us as adults as "the selves who live too much in their heads rather than their bodies, who are burdened with too much knowledge about how the world works rather than excited about how it could work or should, who are afraid of being judged and not being loved. Most adults do not live in a world of forgiveness and unconditional love, unless, that is, they have small children.

Jennifer Senior

An idea? An idea won't get you nothing but another idea. You need money, cash, to make anything happen in this doggone world.

Nathan McCall

Possibly, some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our business or amusement--however serious, however trifling--all dance to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring nothing finally to pass.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Capitalism needs war.

Paul Murray

We discover truth by asking rapier-like questions that cut through the thick fog of doctrinarism. Artists and philosophers must be subversive: we need these rebellious cynics to ask questions, they must resist cultural norms; seek out truths that are not self-evident and challenge everything. Doubt, not blind belief, is essential for discovering truth.

Kilroy J. Oldster

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Cynicism Quotes

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