"Cynical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... man's final flight was observed by Aunt Bell to impress visibly even the bishop—a personage whom she had begun to suspect was the least bit cynical, perhaps from having listened to ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... faced them, that light, fixed smile she had seen so often on others' lips, the smile of pride trying desperately to hide its wounds from the penetrating glances of the curious. Satiric, cynical, or sympathetic, that light smile defied them all, but beneath its guard she felt she was slowly bleeding to death ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... aback by her answer. It sounded as though she wished to end the conversation. But her talk had stirred him strongly, though he tried to hide this under cover of a cynical tone. He said triumphantly: "But you see, after all, you admit that one is not altogether hopeless because he happens to come of ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... proletarians babbling blandly to the nation the ideas of high school seniors! Little men with copy-book ambitions who by mediocrity had thought to emerge from mediocrity into the lustreless and unromantic heaven of a government by the people—and the best, the dozen shrewd men at the top, egotistic and cynical, were content to lead this choir of white ties and wire collar-buttons in a discordant and amazing hymn, compounded of a vague confusion between wealth as a reward of virtue and wealth as a proof of vice, and continued ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... although she detested 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
... had told him a week ago that he would be in so strange a world he would have quarrelled violently with his informant. A week ago he was a cynical clear-sighted modern, a contemner of illusions, a swallower of formulas, a breaker of shams—one who had seen through the heroical and found it silly. Romance and such-like toys were playthings for fatted ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... the roads of France, where you have gone marching to the zone of death valiantly. I know some of your weaknesses and the strength of the spirit that is in you, and the sentiment that lies deep and pure in your hearts in spite of the common clay of your peasant life or the cynical wit you learnt in Paris. Sons of a great race, you have not forgotten the traditions of a thousand years, which makes your history glorious with the spirit of a keen and flashing people, which century after century has renewed its youth ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... date is between 50 and 51. It might be argued that this sonnet has the same right to be recognised as a finished poem with the sonnets 44-47, but those had several years recognition whereas this must have been thrown off one day in a cynical mood, which he could not have wished permanently to intrude ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... they said, no difficulty about him. Only tell him that such and such a decision was his own, and he would be sure to believe the teller. Butterwell was not fond of work, and had been accustomed to lean upon Crosbie for many years. As for Fiasco, he would be cynical in words, but wholly indifferent in deed. If the whole office were made to go to the mischief, Fiasco, in his own grim way, would enjoy ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... and into that tiger-like paw he counted the golden coin; at the musical clink of each piece the eye of the gypsy brightened, and when he closed his hand upon them and thrust them into his pocket his hair-lip curled with a cynical smile. ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... cold and cynical Scot. Enter Virginia Harding. She wears an expression elaborately casual, but there is a light of ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... a cynical laugh. "You're easy to gull," he said; "why, when it serves my purpose I ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... powdered countenance. She leaped from joy to dejection without transition. She could not smile. Her face was as soon darkened by stupidity as it was illuminated by a ribald merriment, insulting and cynical. ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... diseases, except that the former would aim at a more fundamental and perpetual suggestion of serenity. Now no man wants to be even a blessed fool. He does not want to dwell constantly in a fictitious world, even if it be after his own heart. He may from the cynical point of view actually do so, but if he be religious he thinks it is reality, and is satisfied only in so far as he thinks so. He regards the man who has said in his heart that there is no God as the fool, and not because he may have to suffer for ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... These cynical proceedings were trifling compared to the vexations which the Donatists daily inflicted on their opponents. Not only did they tamper with Augustin's people, but the country dwellers of the Catholic Church were continually interfered ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... the statesman in whom the army, as a political power, found its own peculiar representative. His career had hitherto been illustrated chiefly by scandals of private life so flagrant that England and other countries where he had held diplomatic posts had insisted on his removal; but the cynical and reckless audacity of the man rose in his new calling as Minister of Austria to something of political greatness. Few statesmen have been more daring than Schwarzenberg; few have pushed to more excessive lengths the advantages to be derived from the moral or the material ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... deaf that tomb, This is the callous, cold resort of art. 'I give you this.' What do I give? to whom? Words to the air, and balm to my own heart, To its old luxurious and commanded smart. An end to all this tuning, This cynical masquerading; What comfort now in that far final ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... His half cynical, wholly contemptuous ignoring of the real issue between them was more crushing to Demorest than the keenest reproach or most tragic outburst. He did not lift his eyes as Blandford resumed ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... this as he and Ward came in. But his cynical blue eyes went beyond, to a door with a ponderous combination lock. Then they were attracted by something else—the tall, slim figure standing against the black quartz panes of ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... 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 ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... attack any of them with cynical asperity, or with the ambition to establish any new dogmatical tenets in the place of old received opinions. It can, however, do no harm to discuss this important subject with proper reverence and humility. Without alarming ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... in the fortunes of Tacitus to make him trenchant, biting and cynical; but, on the contrary, most gentle, as he was, and most placid and benign. Such being his character, a kind interpretation and a candid sense of actions and individuals meet us on every page of his History. Still in enumerating the virtues of eminent ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... cynical to be frank. In truth, this laughter is suspicious. This laughter has a mission. It is charged with proving the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... enticing, sympathetic or affectionate. The mouth is kissable (as men say), cynical, cruel, sensuous or indifferent, and ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... sun called to him and bewitched him. In the islands in the Seine between Chatou and Port-Marly, on the banks of Sartrouville and Triel he was long noted among the population of boatmen, who have now vanished, for his unwearying biceps, his cynical gaiety of good-fellowship, his unfailing practical jokes, his broad witticisms. Sometimes he would row with frantic speed, free and joyous, through the glowing sunlight on the stream; sometimes, he would wander ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Christmas and the New Year. It is inevitable; and I should be writing basely if I did not devote to it a full chapter. In those few dark days of inactivity, between a fete and the resumption of the implacable daily round, when the weather is usually cynical, and we are paying in our tissues the fair price of excess, we see life and the world in a grey and sinister light, which we imagine to be the only true light. Take the case of the average successful man of thirty-five. What is he ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... excellently suited for representation. From this the public derive pleasure. From this they receive—as from fiction in literature—a great deal of instruction and mental stimulus. Some may be worldly, some social, some cynical, some merely humorous and witty, but a great deal of it, though its literary merit is secondary, is well qualified to bring out all that is most fruitful of good in common sympathies. Now, it is plain that if, because Shakespeare is good reading, people were to give the cold shoulder to the theatre, ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... a thing that could possibly be done even by mere power, still less by mere money—and this Kitchener and his English companions certainly did. There must have been something much more than a mere cynical severity in "organisation" in the man who did it. There must be something more than a mere commercial common-sense in the nation in whose name it was done. It is easy enough, with sufficient dulness ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... cynical gaze from the older woman to the younger—from the bleached hair and rouged lips to a fresh, pure, and vivid loveliness. He saw her ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... 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
... following the war with Hannibal, Cato is certainly the most striking single figure. It is only as a man of letters that he has to be noticed here; and the character of a man of letters was, perhaps, the last in which he would have wished to be remembered or praised. Yet the cynical and indomitable old man, with his rough humour, his narrow statesmanship, his obstinate ultra-conservatism, not only produced a large quantity of writings, but founded and transmitted to posterity a distinct and important body of critical ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... 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 ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... judicial idea, the sense of the responsibility for impartial judgment in international affairs, as distinguished from the opportunity for negotiation in international affairs. We are too apt, both those who are despondent about the progress of civilization and those who are cynical about the unselfishness of mankind, to be impatient in our judgment, and to forget how long the life of a nation is, and how slow the processes of civilization are; how long it takes to change character and to educate whole ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... of an impartial and critical mind on the distinguished people whom Murray observed from without. It is worth remarking that among many remarks on persons, I have found not one of a censorious, cynical, envious, or unfriendly nature. Youth is often captious and keenly critical; partly because youth generally has an ideal, partly, perhaps chiefly, from mere intellectual high spirits and sense of the incongruous; occasionally the motive ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... to the barnyard, Strawmyer following them, still vociferating about the wrongs of the farmer at the hands of a cynical and corrupt State government. They climbed into the State police car, the sergeant and the private in front and Parker into the rear, laying his camera on the seat beside ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... the broad basis of a common loyalty to Christ? To what purpose is this overlapping and conflict? The reluctant tribute of the ancient sceptic—"See how these Christians love one another"—has become the modern worldling's cynical and familiar jibe; and when to the spectacle of Christian disunion is added the observation that professing Christians of all denominations appear to differ from other men, for the most part, "solely in their opinions" and not ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... joyousness or genial spirit of enjoyment. I am not going to repay her majesty's condescension so ill, or so much to abuse the privileges of a guest, as to draw upon my recollections of what passed for the materials of a cynical critique. Every thing was done, I doubt not, which court etiquette permitted, to thaw those ungenial restraints which gave to the whole too much of a ceremonial and official character, and to each actor in the scene gave too much of the air belonging ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... without hope, and without exertion; nor is this a solitary instance, where a man of genius, deprived of the idolised partner of his existence, has no longer been able to find an object in his studies, and where even fame itself has ceased to interest. The reason which ROUSSEAU alleges for the cynical spleen which so frequently breathes forth in his works, shows how the domestic character of the man of genius leaves itself in his productions. After describing the infelicity of his domestic affairs, occasioned by the mother of Theresa, and Theresa herself, both women of the lowest class and the ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... drilled in the decencies of his profession. Off came his hat, of course; and his manner, however facetious and easy it may have been the moment before, changed on the instant to gravity and decorum. Not so with Jason. He entered St. Peter's, Albany, with exactly the same indifferent and cynical air with which he had seemed to regard everything but money, since he entered "York Colony." Usually, he wore his cocked-hat on the back of his head, thereby lending himself a lolloping, negligent, and, at the same time, defying air; but I observed ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... was at Murder Point, and he would soon be married to Peggy, after which, no matter what avalanche of good luck befell him, there would be no return. What would his proud old mother say to a little half-breed grandchild? The mere thought made him smile. In cynical self-derision, he pictured himself accompanied by his Indian tribe, knocking at the door of the old red house on Clapton Common—and his reception there. He gave a name to his picture, and it was "The Return ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... of duty was accompanied by no harsh manner or cynical expressions; for the man whose soul is ennobled by true heroism, possesses a heart as tender as it is firm. His calmness under the most trying circumstances, and his uniform sweetness of manner, were almost poetical. They manifested 'the most sustained tenderness of soul that ever caressed ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... laugh, and gave a slap to his thigh that shattered the cat's peace of mind for the remainder of that morning, after which he re-opened the letter, spread it carefully out on the table, and, in the most intensely cynical tones, began a disjointed commentary ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... the shops were thronged with customers. It was rather a darkening of the spirit which fell back upon itself, to find a more grievous darkness within. Margaret nearly spoke a dozen times, but something throttled her. She felt petty and awkward, and her meditations on Christmas grew more cynical. Peace? It may bring other gifts, but is there a single Londoner to whom Christmas is peaceful? The craving for excitement and for elaboration has ruined that blessing. Goodwill? Had she seen any example of it in the hordes of purchasers? Or in herself. She had failed to ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... anxiety was set at rest—if he could judge by the instalment before him, and the book was not in any danger of coming absolutely to grief—it would do his reputation no harm. It was not, to be sure, the sort of book he would have written himself, as he affected the cynical mode of treatment and the indiscriminate satire which a rather young writer feels instinctively that the world expects from him. Still, it was not so bad. It was slightly dreamy and mystical in parts, the work of a man who had lived more amongst books ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... shyness wasn't one of them. She gave him a smile when he left that would have brought a less impressionable young man than he back again to that Cafe; but for the rest of the day I noticed 'Mam'sel Marie' frowned to herself a good deal, and was quite unusually cynical in her ...
— The Observations of Henry • Jerome K. Jerome
... never mind." She tosses her cigarette into the grate, and lights another. "I wonder why they always have cynical persons smoke, on the stage? I don't see that the two things necessarily go together, but it does give you a kind of thrill when they strike a match, and it lights up their faces when they put it to the cigarette. You ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... he saw that she was forgiving him. But she would not forget. He had a cynical doctrine, to the effect that a woman's first kiss of passion left an ineradicable mark on her, and he was quite certain that Lily had ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... them with cynical disgust. His lips twisted slightly with distaste. "There we have it," he said. "A violent-tempered thief from the business world; an over-expensive purchase by a rich playboy who became his widow by ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... prostitution by our own military authorities, as was done by some of them on the Mexican border. Conceivably a system of inspected government houses and of prophylactic measures might be devised which would eliminate disease altogether, and yet demoralize the young manhood of our nation by a cynical scientific materialism such as we are fighting against in the powers that dragged the world into this war. We are more opposed to immorality than to disease, which is its penalty. We fear not only the impairment of the physical fitness of the men as a fighting force, but much more the menace of the ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... Aristotle and others): Whereas it is notorious that most of our Professors never lay out a Farthing either in Pen, Ink, or Paper. Others are for deriving them from Diogenes, because several of the leading Men of the Sect have a great deal of the cynical Humour in them, and delight much in Sun-shine. But then again, Diogenes was content to have his constant Habitation in a narrow Tub; whilst our Philosophers are so far from being of his Opinion, that it's Death to them to be confined within ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... words: "Can you hear me now?" The operation seems easy, in the telling, or again perhaps it appears intensely involved and hardly worth the trouble. A motto of Shirley's was: "Nothing is too much trouble if it's worth while." So, with this. To the cynical camera man its general nature was expressed in his whispered phrase ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... their lofty tone, which truly is above suspicion, with the shameful sensationalism of their news-columns? They know not the meaning of sincerity. If they really believed that "a baby can educate a man," they would suppress their reporters. In short, they are either blind or cynical. From these alternatives there is no escape, and for their sakes, as well as for America's, I hope they write with their ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... A cynical smile twisted his features as he spoke, and Roger Seaton, standing opposite to him with his fine head well thrown back on his shoulders and his whole face alive with the power of thought, looked rather like a Viking expostulating with some ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... a polite cynical indulgence to views so lost to reason and propriety. But he couldn't quite stand any more. He made a sign to Jeff and they adjourned ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... slightly built man, just beyond the vague line of "young," glanced up with his dark, somewhat sombre and yet softly cynical eyes at the face of his companion who was driving. This companion was unmistakably young, and there was not a trace of cynicism in his grey-blue eyes which looked out upon the rain and mist with pleasant cheerfulness. He was neither particularly fair nor dark; but there ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... fire. "I'd like them all To understand, when I am gone," he muttered. "But how to do it delicately! I can't Apologize. I'll hint at it ... in verse; And, to be sure that Rosalind reads it through, I'll make it an appendix to my will!" —Still cynical, you see. He couldn't help it. He had seen much, felt much. He snapped the snuff box, Shook his white periwig, trimmed a long quill pen, And then began to write, most carefully, These couplets, in ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... of its own goatishness. This one was a nanny-goat, and it answered to the name of Nanny with an intelligence that was otherwise wholly employed in making trouble. It went up and down stairs, from cellar to garret, and in and out of all the rooms, like anybody, with a faint, cynical indifference in the glance of its cold gray eyes that gave no hint of its purposes or performances. In the chambers it chewed the sheets and pillow-cases on the beds, and in the dining-room, if it found nothing else, it would do its best ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... thus far in vain, for the proprietor of the saying that "Economy is second or third cousin to Avarice." I went rather confidently to Rochefoucauld, but it is not among that gentleman's light luggage of cynical maxims. ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... reporter's status is unique. Youth on the threshold of no other profession commands the same respect, gains audience so readily to the same august personages. Doors slammed in his face only flatter his self-importance. He becomes cynical as he sees how easily the spot light is made to flash upon the unworthiest figures by the flimsiest mechanism. He drops his plummet into shoal and deep water and from his contemplation of the wreck-littered shore grows skeptical of the ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... time wasted for the journalist since he, Banneker, intended fully that Gardner should not see Io. Deep would have been his disgust and self-derision could he have observed the effect of the message upon the cynical and informed journalist who, however, did not receive it until the second day after its transmission, as he had been away on ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... from the Vedantist standpoint, and beginning from the worst systems of philosophy ascends to those which are relatively correct. This account contains most of what we know about their doctrines,[792] but is obviously biassed: it represents them as cynical voluptuaries holding that the only end of man is sensual enjoyment. We are told that they admitted only one source of knowledge, namely perception, and four elements, earth, water, fire and air, and ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... did but yourself, just the same. Don't be cynical—you're something of a hero, if you only knew it. It was you who went into the burning express shed and saved the account books and ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... him to take it, pray, that you identify yourself with the affair so persistently and violently?" demanded Mr. Galloway, in a cynical tone. And Roland answered with a hot and ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... had a letter this morning from another Italian writer. It contains the following passage: 'The soul of this nation is dead. The old enthusiasms are gone. We have the most selfish, the most cynical bourgeoisie in Europe. Happy the men of 1860! They had some illusions left—religion, monarchy, country. We too have men who would give themselves—if they could. But to what? No one wants them any more—nessuno li vuole piu!' Well, there are ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that nothing was immutably right, but only so by convention. They undermined all confidence in truth and religion by teaching its uncertainty. They denied to men even the capability of arriving at truth. They practically affirmed the cold and cynical doctrine that there is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink. Qui bono, the cry of the Epicureans, of the latter Romans, and of most men in a period of great outward prosperity, was the popular inquiry,—who ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... his wife, then; nay, for wifehood itself, that he wrote? And so, was it quite fair for unmarried Penfield Evans, burning at his breakfast table a cynical cigarette over the printed philippic, to murmur, "Gee! old ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... traced for her the career of Buckhurst, sparing her nothing; I led up to my own appearance on the scene, reviewed briefly what we both knew, then disclosed to her in its most trivial detail the conference between Buckhurst and myself in which his cynical avowal was revealed in all its ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... sympathetic words and with alms—the familiar means by which the heartless cheat themselves into a reputation for heart. She always left the objects of her benevolence the poorer for her ministrations, though they did not realize it. She adopted as the guiding principle of her life the cynical philosophy—"Give people what they want, never what they need." By sympathizing effusively with those in trouble, she encouraged them in low-spiritedness; by lavishing alms, she weakened struggling poverty into pauperism. But she took ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... parties—if she worries about her failure to do the things which other girls can do, and which God never intended she also should do—if she is spending her time reading books which can never be of any possible good to her—if she is becoming fault-finding, cynical, cross, selfish—if she is doing any of these things which keep her from being what she ought to be—her everyday life needs trimming! Think it over. If you find any useless, strength-absorbing thing in your life, ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... breast just as the first ray of dawn was struggling through the stormy night. She would sacrifice herself to her sister—that she had determined on; and hence came that cold gleam of happiness, for there is happiness in self-sacrifice, whatever the cynical may say. At first her woman's nature had risen in rebellion against the thought. Why should she throw her life away? She had as good a right to this man as Bessie, and she knew that by the strength of her own hand she could hold him against Bessie in all her beauty, ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... Foreign Secretary, in a statement made September 16th said: "It is incredible that anything can come of this proposal.... This cynical proposal of the Austrian Government is not a genuine attempt to obtain peace. It is an attempt to divide the Allies." Premier Clemenceau in France took similar grounds, and stated in the French Senate: "We will fight until the hour when the enemy comes ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... proffers The best birthday wishes good feeling can shape! A snap of the fingers for cynical scoffers! A fig for the framers of venomous jape. May Peace and Goodwill be your lasting possession, Your proud "Valour" tempered by "years ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. Sep. 12, 1891 • Various
... made the subject of a persecution for its immoral tendency. It was also vigorously combated by, among others, Bishop Berkeley and William Law, author of The Serious Call. While the author probably had no intention of subverting morality, his views of human nature were assuredly cynical and degrading in a high degree. Another of his works, A Search into the Nature of Society (1723), appended to the later versions of the Fable, also startled the public mind, which his last works, Free Thoughts on Religion and An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... his mother just at this time; and he appears to have 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 ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... brilliant young man, elegant in figure, well dressed, joyous, cynical, came whistling up the path. He cut off the clover tops with his walking-stick. The butterflies, the pleasant aromas, and all the manifestations ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... official, of course. Tommy is not a sentimental sort of animal so some of his definitions are not exactly complimentary, but he is not cynical and does not mean to offend anyone higher up. It is just a sort of "ragging" or "kidding," as the American would say, that helps him pass the ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... sad wonder. Such words of cynical unbelief were in dark, terrible contrast with the fair young face. He saw the mind and training of her father in all she said, but he bitterly condemned the worldly, inconsistent life of multitudes in the church who do more to confirm unbelievers than all their sophistries. ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... cynical and naked impudence of it, took me like a buffet. There, in a group of strangers, my cheek reddened under it, and for the moment I had a mind to run. I had done better to run. By a chance his eye missed mine as he swaggered ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ruffian! On the end of his spinal column he teetered, all four feet in the air, the cock of his head irresistibly suggesting the tilt of a gamin's cap. His tongue hung waggishly out of his mouth, and a sort of loose, dissipated, tough, cynical humour pervaded his person, from the squint of his little eyes to the absurd post of his hind legs. There was less of the immature bear about him than of the miniature bear. I suppose a young wild animal is ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... face sad. J. John Reynolds, backer of the Bunch, had promised to come down, later. Chief of Police, Bill Hobard, was there, looking grim, as if he was half glad and half sorry to lose this passel of law-abiding but worrisome young eccentrics. There were various cynical and curious loafers around, too. There were Chippie Potter and his mutt—a more wistful and worshipping pair would have been ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... retained a devoted attachment to Stanislaus. He for some time led a restless life about Europe—visiting Italy, Sicily, Malta, and the south of Spain; troubled with attacks of rheumatism, gout, and the effects of a "Hungarian fever." He had become more and more cynical and irascible, and had more than one "affair of honor," in one of which he killed his antagonist. His splenetic feelings, as well as his political sentiments, were occasionally vented in severe attacks ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... shoulders. "You're quite a change. It's generally the other way round. Men ask me for money, and I do the refusing." Usually, his expression was hard, almost cynical, but as he looked at Jimmy it softened, and he seemed to grow years younger. He was back again on the China Coast, in the days when success was a thing of the future, and therefore greatly to be prized. "You'll do well, Grierson, you've got it in you, just as I had. And, after all, London is ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... hailed him by the same title in return. Or, perhaps, he was only playing on the youth's vanity, for Pompeius, who was for his courage and good looks the darling of the soldiers and the women, was very vain, and flattery was a potion which it seems to have been one of Sulla's cynical maxims always to administer in strong doses. [Sidenote: by Philippus;] Later on he was joined by Philippus, the foe of Drusus, who for shifty and successful knavery seems to have been another Marcus Scaurus; ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... other people, I reflected, who must have read the Mail with an equally deep if rather different interest. I tried to fancy how the news of my escape had affected Joyce. For all my cynical outburst in the morning, I knew well that no truer or more honest little heart ever beat in a girl's breast, and that the uncertainty about my fate must even now be causing her the ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... down near her window and rocked slowly, to calm herself. Outside the Sunday movement of the little suburban town went by: the older Wheeler girl, Nina, who had recently married Leslie Ward, in her smart little car; Harrison Miller, the cynical bachelor who lived next door, on his way to the station news stand for the New York papers; young couples taking small babies for the air in a perambulator; younger couples, their eyes on each other and ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a certain class of sporting snobs who endeavour to enhance their own consequence or indulge their cynical humour by talking with the utmost contempt of any variation from the kind of hunting-dress in use, in their own particular district. The best commentary on the supercilious tailoring criticism of these gents is to be found in the fact that within a century ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... Darya Alexandrovna as revolting in spite of the good-natured and pleasing face of the young woman; but now she could not help recalling these words. In those cynical words there was indeed a ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... are lyric. In the usual sense. They are not much different from poetry that praises gardens. The content is the distress of love, death, universal longing. The impulse to formulate them in the "cynical" vein (like cabaret songs) may, for example, might have arisen from the wish to feel superior. Most of the eighty poems are insignificant. They were not presented to the public. All except one (one of the last) ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... every detail of this scheme which would some day make her a rich woman. Even if the dream never came true, the mere hope that it might was enough to give her a thrill. Virginia remained cold. She was more cynical, having already heard many speeches of the same kind and from the same quarter—all dealing with wonderful projects that invariably met with a sudden death. This announcement of a new idea, therefore, did not even make ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... his inmost nature; those which never betray their existence until the outward chord to which they vibrate in response sends its message to stir them. But was she not already pledged to that other,—that cold-blooded, contriving, venal, cynical, selfish, polished, fascinating man of the world, whose artful strategy would pass with nine women out of ten for the ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... blue frock-coat and striped waistcoat.... I can hear his unpleasantly jarring laugh.... He went everywhere, was conspicuous at all possible kinds of 'dancing classes.' ... I remember I could not listen to his cynical stories without a peculiar shudder.... Kolosov once compared him to an unswept Russian refreshment bar ... a horrible comparison! And with all that, there was a lot of intelligence, common sense, observation, and wit in the man.... He sometimes impressed us by some ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Miss Craven, what a cynical thing to say! You! who are loved at first sight by the people in the street as you pass. Why, in the club I can tell by the faces of the men whether you have been lately in the ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... very pleasant to observe how perfectly free he was from any petty feeling of jealousy at seeing himself eclipsed by one of his own men. As the boat shoved off from the ship's side I thought to myself—"Depend on it, there is something in store for Newman; he will not come back in the cynical spirit in which he seemed to be after his ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... afternoon and evening, gazing at the surging crowd which passes by. One sees day after day the same faces, and one wonders why they are there, for what they are looking. Some of these men have brutal, sensual faces; others are cynical-looking and sneer. These, it seems, nothing can move or surprise. They have a look which says: 'Oh, I know you, I have met your kind before. You do not move me, nothing can. I have tried everything, there is nothing new for me.' And ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... exceedingly cynical and stupid story," observed the girl. "And so I shall be off to look for Jurgen. For he makes love very amusingly," says Dorothy, with the sweetest, loveliest meditative smile that ever was lost ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... this new experience of his that was sobering him, but it helped him not a little to check his wonted boyish exuberance that at the table opposite him sat a strange young man, across whose dark, magnetic face there flitted, now and then, a lazy, cynical smile. Hughie feared that lazy smile, and he felt that it would shrivel into ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
... it was the chivalry, but she had a vague fear that it was the wickedness. There was a young woman among the seniors in Carroll College who was old in a certain brilliant hardness of mind—a young woman with a cynical outlook on life, and who was not always regardful of her seed-sowing in fresher hearts. Ardea remembered a saying of hers, flung out one evening in the college parlors when the talk of her group had turned on the goodness of good boys: "Why can't you be sincere with yourselves? ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... first was named Lemoine-Tacherat, and not Bacherel, as has been wrongly printed: the second was named Barlet. These names should be noted. The unprecedented assurance of this Barlet was remarked. Nothing was wanting in him,—cynical speech, provoking gesture, sardonic intonation. It was with an inexpressible air of insolence that Barlet, when summoning the meeting to dissolve itself, added, "Rightly or Wrongly." They murmured on the benches of the Assembly, "Who ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... fierce blood-lust of those savage fanatics? If she cared to do so, would she dare test her power in so desperate a game? If one must be sacrificed which would she spare, De Noyan or his hapless wife? Looking at her, cold, cynical, lustful, her eyes still turned on his face, I felt no doubt. Let the foul fiend choose! by all the gods, Cairnes should brain her where she stood, and, Heaven helping me to do the deed, the one I loved ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... upon her logical mind, but I repudiated this cynical supposition. "I can't imagine her—when it should come to the point—embarking with the famille Ruck. But I wish she ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... a vision had seen the historic group in a future issue of the Film. He had also, in the same vision, seen his mother conning the said issue, and the sardonic curve of her lips as she recognized her son therein, and he had even heard her dry, cynical, contemptuous exclamation: "Bless us!" He could never have looked squarely in his mother's face again if that group had appeared in her chosen organ! Her silent and grim scorn would have crushed his self-conceit to a miserable, hopeless pulp. Hence his resolve ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... stranger, too. He was a big, florid man, with a good-natured face and great square chin, and he was standing with his back to the fire, looking very much at home. He gave a slight start as Christopher tumbled in, and a queer little cynical smile dawned on his face as he watched ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... From Dort came the English cynical writer Bernard Mandeville, born in 1670, author of The Fable of the Bees, that very shrewd and advanced commentary upon national hypocrisies—so advanced, indeed, that several of the more revolutionary of ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... for appearing at the critical moment and for promptly clearing away all difficulties. Almost unconsciously she was forced into comparing him with Maryon Rooke—Rooke, with his curious fascination and detached, half-cynical outlook on life, his beautiful ideals and—Nan's inner self flinched from the acknowledgment—his frequent fallings-short of them. Unwillingly she had to confess to the fact that Maryon was something both of poseur and actor, with an ineradicable streak of cynicism in his composition ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... which followed he found himself looking into her ardent face with a wonder not unmixed with awe. To his rather cynical view of the Fletchers such an outburst came as little less than a veritable thunderclap, and for the first time in his life he felt a need to modify his conservative theories as to the necessity of blue blood to nourish high ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... I never loved you so well and so passionately as the day you stood at the trial, ringed round with the wolves, the clever lawyers, the stolid witnesses, the ponderous books, the cynical air of religious solemnity with which the machinery of the law thinly cloaks its lust ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... passed over Tom's face. It was partly cynical and partly suggestive of that amused toleration of our youthful credulity which seemed to be a part of that discomposing patronage that everybody extended to the Club. As he said ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Memoirs" in her hands by way of improving her mind; and she had been struck by a passage in which Greville describes Lord Melbourne's training of the young Queen Victoria, whose Prime Minister he was. The man of middle-age, accomplished, cynical and witty, suddenly confronted with a responsibility which challenged both his heart and his conscience—and that a responsibility towards an attractive young girl whom he could neither court nor command, towards whom ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... theory is grounded upon the doctrine of Malthus and the doctrine of Hobbes. The elder DeCandolle had conceived the idea of the struggle for existence, and, in a passage which would have delighted the cynical philosopher of Malmesbury, had declared that all Nature is at war, one organism with another or with external Nature; and Lyell and Herbert had made considerable use of it. But Hobbes in his theory of society, and Darwin in his theory of natural history, ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... looked shocked; slowly his pale face took on a look of cynical amusement. "Yes, yes. Certainly. Who more so?" He appeared to hesitate a moment, and then added with a laugh which held a curious tinge of defiance: "In fact, I myself have the honor of being the owner and editor of the Gazette—Coligny Smith, ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... precisely by following the fashion, however conspicuous it may be, that we are less remarkable than when we carefully dress far more simply and plainly—in short, differently to what it prescribes. Which do you regard as the vainer, the fashionably-dressed young gentleman on the Canopic way, or the cynical philosopher with his unkempt hair, his carefully-ragged cloak over his shoulders, and a heavy cudgel in his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... servile imitators of the court at Versailles, and the culture and the civilization for which they hungered were French—only French; and for Frederick, an intimate companionship with Voltaire was his supreme desire. But a closer view of the witty, cynical Frenchman wrought a wonderful change. The finely pointed shafts of ridicule when aimed at himself were not so entertaining. And his guest, no longer persona grata, was escorted over the frontier ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... three men of real gift. Forbes himself was a man of uncommon vivacity. Small, stocky, with an unruly thatch of yellow hair and a quaintly wry and homely face, he hid his shyness and his brilliancy behind a brusque manner. Ostensibly cynical and a witty satirist of his more sentimental fellows, his desk was full of charming ballades and pieces d'amour, scratched off at white heat in odd moments. His infinite fund of full-flavoured jest had won him the nickname of Priapus. But beneath the ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... taste in respect to poetry became more rigorous as he grew older. In 1823 in a letter to Miss Baillie he commented on Mrs. Hemans as "somewhat too poetical for my taste—too many flowers, I mean, and too little fruit—but that may be the cynical criticism of an elderly gentleman; for it is certain that when I was young I read verses of every kind with infinitely more indulgence, because with more pleasure than I can now do—the more shame for me now to refuse the complaisance which I have had so often to solicit."[311] Similarly he speaks ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... dwelt Within view of his high turret window. Each day Which gave him a glimpse of her, love laid away As a poem in life's precious folio. Night Held her face like a picture, dream-framed for his sight. So he fed on the crumbs from love's table, the while Fate sat looking on with a cynical smile. ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... with a dash of raillery, over his coffee-cup; "admit you are a humbug, you whitened sepulchre of an anticipated chick! Until you found a congenial soul and overwhelmed me with your confidence, what a career of deception—not mean, of course, but cynical—ironical—you have been leading. What a jest it must have been to you to be sold as new laid! How you laughed in your quiet way at the mockery of life. Surely it was a worthy pair to Swift in cassock and bands conducting a marriage service. I can well ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... we study the I. W. W., the above is the program of the world-wide conspiracy of a single class, a minority of society, to carry out the cynical purpose of I. W. W.'ism—to "take possession of the earth and the machinery ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... of Italian marble, and the carving I thought must be Italian also. There were reliefs, you will perhaps remember, of Eliezer and Rebekah, and of Jacob opening the well for Rachel, and similar subjects; but, by way of disarming suspicion, I suppose, the Abbot had carefully abstained from any of his cynical ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... Mrs. Siddons and Miss O'Neill had a great advantage over me in their tragic partners. Have you heard that Mr. Hope, the author of "Anastasius," is just dead? That was a wonderfully clever book, of rather questionable moral effects, I think; the same sort of cynical gloom and discontent which pervade Byron's writings prevail in that; and I thought it a pity, because in other respects it seems a genuine book, true to life and human nature. A few days before I heard of his death, Mr. Harness was ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... collapse of the commercial world were at hand. He forgot that he had heard quite similar stories twenty years before. Then they had been told by ingenuous youths full of the importance of the information they had just acquired: now they were told by garrulous old gentlemen, with a cynical laugh which was more amusing than the hot-headed asseveration of the juniors. It was, on the whole, a delightful evening, this first evening of his return to club-life; and then it was so convenient to go up stairs to bed instead of having to walk from the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... month, I wrote to Miss Hallam and occasionally had a few lines from Stella, who had become a protegee of Miss Hallam's too. They appeared to get on very well together, at which I did not wonder; for Stella, with all her youthfulness, was of a cynical turn of mind, which must ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... enactments have very much influence on the prevalence of homosexuality. The chief effect seems to be that the attempt at suppression arouses the finer minds among sexual inverts to undertake the enthusiastic defense of homosexuality, while coarser minds are stimulated to cynical bravado.[273] ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... tried to imitate the half cynical, half nostalgic skepticism which had made the author of 'Les Nuits' so powerful over the minds of the new generation and so dear ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... recently been presented at Court when the scandal of her mother's escapade shook the town, and changed her father in a day from one of the happiest to one of the most cynical, embittered and despairing of men. She, who had been brought up by both her parents as a Catholic, who had from her earliest years been earnestly educated in the beauties of religion, was now exposed to the almost frantic persuasions of a father who, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... to hide a cynical smile. He had good reasons for thinking it was not the one he had flung out ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... the recent overlay of his own generation. Aside from a minute shyness, he felt that the old cynical kinship with his mother had not been one bit broken. Yet for the first few days he wandered about the gardens and along the shore in a state of superloneliness, finding a lethargic content in smoking "Bull" at the garage with ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of some inhabitants. At once the doctor saw that these were not Venusians; they had facial expressions as sour and cynical as the typical Venusian's ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... of men, inexhaustible in story, inimitable in pantomimic narration, and yet with the keenest intellectual penetration shining through all his Neapolitan prank and buffoonery. Holbach cared most for the physical sciences. Marmontel brought a vein of sentimentalism, and Helvetius a vein of cynical formalism. Diderot played Socrates, Panurge, Pantophile; questioning, instructing, combining; pouring out knowledge and suggestion, full of interest in every subject, sympathetic with every vein, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... child of darkness and of platitude) was that of one who should say: "You dear, funny old simpleton, whom I have had to bear with all my life—how terribly in the way you seem now." With what slightly amused and cynical playfulness this Hamlet said: "I had thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well; they imitated humanity ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... sorrows—sorrows from strange folk, and yet keener sorrows from thine own kindred." "Hardship and sorrow!" he breaks out again, "not a king but would wish to be without these if he could. But I know that he cannot!" The loneliness which breathes in words like these has often begotten in great rulers a cynical contempt of men and the judgements of men. But cynicism found no echo in the large and sympathetic temper of AElfred. He not only longed for the love of his subjects, but for the remembrance of "generations" to come. Nor did his inner gloom or anxiety check for an instant ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... only one redeeming point, so far as I could ever discover, and that was that he was a splendid navigator. He prided himself upon his skill with the sextant, and often used to assert—in that cynical way of his that might be either jest or earnest, one could never tell which—that some day he would become a pirate king and establish himself magnificently on some fair island of the Pacific! Heavens! thought I, could it be possible that the fellow had actually been in earnest, ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... was nature's failure to make a man," Dar Hyal answered, the while the imp of mockery laughed in the corners of his mouth and curled his thin cynical lips derisively. ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... by the sleeve and drew him towards Loge, who, still seated on the deck with his long legs stretched out in front of him, was now yawning with a cynical affectation ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... understood Poe. And we never shall understand Poe. It is immensely to our credit that, owing to the admirable obstinacy of Mr. J.H. Ingram, we now admit that Poe was neither a drunkard, a debauchee, nor a cynical eremite. This is about as far as we shall get. Poe's philosophy of art, as discovered in his essays and his creative work, is purely Latin and, as such, incomprehensible and even naughty to the Saxon mind. To the average bookish Englishman Poe means "The Pit and the Pendulum," ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... unpleasantly obtrusive; but that in looking round the assembly of fine ladies at Dejazet's performances, I comforted myself by feeling very sure that half of them did not understand what they were listening to; but I think it must have been "nuts" to the clever, cynical, witty, impudent Frenchwoman to see these dames trois fois respectables swallow her performances ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... thought was 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 much to ...
— Midnight In Beauchamp Row - 1895 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... earnestly considered the large head, wedged between the shoulders as if a giant's hand had pressed it down, the masterful nose, the keen grey eyes, and the cynical lips; and in that moment determined to make him Ada's husband. Yet he was the last man she would have chosen for a son-in-law. A loafer and a vagabond, he spoke of marriage with a grin. Half his time was spent under ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... an audience merry. She Stoops to Conquer and The School for Scandal remain among genuine literary masterpieces. They are revivals of the old Congreve method, and imply the growth of a society more decent and free from the hard cynical brutality which disgraced the earlier writers. I certainly cannot give a sufficient reason why the society of Johnson and Reynolds, full of shrewd common sense, enjoying humour, and with a literary social tradition, should not have found ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... she found herself seated at Aunt Flo's small, perfectly appointed dinner-table, she found it increasingly difficult to keep her mind upon the brilliant and cynical conversation of her most admired friend. To be sure, they exchanged glances freighted with meaning, and as usual her vanity was touched by the subtle homage of one who apparently regarded the rest of humanity with such cold ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... said, presently. "I've always had plenty of it. What's it done for me? When you have it you can't tell whether people are friends to you or only friends to your money. It makes you cynical, suspicious. What's worse, you depend too much on it. You think it will do everything. Then if you land in a place where it's no good and you haven't got it, anyway, you're up against it a good deal harder than the fellow who never ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... those whom he betrayed. Besides, I know something of Bergaz; he's a freebooter." Guillaume made a sorrowful gesture, and then in a saddened voice continued: "Oh, I can understand all claims and all legitimate reprisals. But theft, cynical theft for the purpose of profit and enjoyment, is beyond me! It lowers my hope of a better and more equitable form of society. Yes, that burglary at the Princess's house has greatly ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... certain rough knocks which more sheltered boarding-school girls never get, an accuracy of estimate as to the actual feeling of men towards the women they profess to admire unreservedly which (had he been able to conceive of it) old Mr. Sommerville would have thought nothing less than cynical. ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... and unnatural vices, the domestic crimes of cruelty, adultery, and bloodshed, the political scheming and the subtle arts of vengeance, the ecclesiastical tyranny and craft, the cynical scepticism and lustre of luxurious godlessness, which made Italy in the midst of her refinement blaze like 'a bright and ominous star' before the nations; these were the very elements in which the genius of Webster—salamander-like in flame—could live and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... at his banker's when he heard the news spoken of as the latest item from American Paris, and his start and exclamation of disgust drew forth some cynical after-comment ...
— "Le Monsieur De La Petite Dame" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of amazing power, written by a man who takes, as Swift took throughout life, a misanthropical view of human nature, and who agrees with the cynical judgment of Carlyle, that men are mostly fools. Swift, however, did not consider fools useless, but observes that they 'are as necessary for a good writer as pen, ink, and paper.' Never was volume written which ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... his speech was a brusque medley of slang, jargon, dialect and profanity. It was said of him that he could swear more forcibly, variously and frequently than any other man of his generation. Like the Astors, he was cynical, distrustful, secretive and parsimonious. He kept his plans entirely to himself. In his business dealings he was never known to have shown the slightest mercy; he demanded the last cent due. His close-fistedness was such a passion that for many years he refused to substitute new carpets for ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... incomprehensible monosyllable, that sounded profoundly cynical. Birkin felt afraid, as if he dared not realise. And Mrs Crich moved away, forgetting him. But she returned ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... of wrong. He was a man to whom his own interests were much; he was unscrupulous; he was ostentatious; he was not above stooping to mean, unmanly compliances with the humours of the Queen. But he was a man with a higher ideal than he attempted to follow. He saw, not without cynical scorn, through the shows and hollowness of the world. His intellect was of that clear and unembarrassed power which takes in as wholes things which other men take in part by part. And he was in its highest form a representative of that ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... a chamber in Baptista's house, where Katharine is berating Bianca for accepting serenades from suitors, and abuses her even to blows. The scene closes with a vigorous song for Katharine ("I'll give myself to no one"), which is greeted with cynical applause by Petruchio, Baptista, Lucentio, and Hortensio, who enter, the last two disguised as teachers. In the next scene, Petruchio and Katharine alone, we have the turbulent wooing, which is accompanied throughout by ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... rejoined Mowat, with a cynical smile, "an' some geese manage, by sayin' nothin' at all to anybody, and lookin' like owls, to pass themselves off as ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... full of political prejudice and partisan advocacy as any of his parliamentary speeches. It makes the facts of English History as fabulous as his Lays do those of Roman tradition; and it is written with as captious, as dogmatical, and as cynical a spirit as the bitterest of his Reviews. That upon so serious an undertaking he has lavished uncommon exertion, is not to be doubted; nor can any one during the first reading escape the entrainement of his picturesque, vivid, and ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... 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, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... uglinesses of life, in mass and class and individual, are now impossible!—and all through Barty Josselin and his quaint ironies of pen and pencil, forever trembling between tears and laughter, with never a cynical spark or a hint ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... M. Batifol's 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 ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... Cadet's cynical eyes flashed in genuine sympathy with Bigot, and he laid his heavy hand upon his shoulder and uttered a frank exclamation of admiration at his ruse to cheat La Pompadour and La ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... where the Lombardi built one of their most romantically graceful churches of pale Istrian stone, and where the Campo Santo has for centuries received the dead into its oozy clay. The cemetery is at present undergoing restoration. Its state of squalor and abandonment to cynical disorder makes one feel how fitting for Italians would be the custom of cremation. An island in the lagoons devoted to funeral pyres is a solemn and ennobling conception. This graveyard, with its ruinous walls, its mangy riot of unwholesome weeds, its corpses festering in slime ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... remark with a short laugh. He was a big, stout man; his name was Karl Steinmetz, and it is a name well known in the Government of Tver to this day. He spoke jerkily, as stout men do when they ride, and when he had laughed his good-natured, half-cynical laugh, he closed his lips beneath a huge gray mustache. So far as one could judge from the action of a square and deeply indented chin, his mouth was expressive at that time—and possibly at all times—of a humorous resignation. ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... refer either flippantly or with gentle humor to their days of courtship, forgetting (or ignoring) the tremulous eagerness, the grave questioning and the tender solemnity of purpose with which they weighed the joys and responsibilities of married life. It is easy to be cynical or evasive or unduly sentimental in writing of our youthful love affairs, when the frosts of sixty years have whitened our heads, after years of toil and care have dimmed our eyes and thinned our blood, but ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... extreme vagaries of the Manchester school. He knew that there was no morality, no immutable right and wrong, in an impost or a free list. It has been the fashion to refer to Mr. Disraeli's declaration that free trade was "a mere question of expediency" as a proof of that gentleman's cynical indifference to moral principles. That the late Earl of Beaconsfield had no deep convictions on any subject may be readily admitted, but in this instance he uttered a very plain and simple truth, which all the talk in the world about free trade as the harbinger and foundation ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... did not mean to consult me. We had gone less than a block further when I heard a voice, "Hello! Billy!" I turned. Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! Of all the thankless encounters—Edgerton Rosythe, moving picture critic of the Western City "Times." Precisely the most cynical, the most profane, the most boisterous person in a cynical and profane and boisterous business! And he had me here, in full daylight, with a figure just out of a stained glass window in St. ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... pennies and nickels and dimes. They land on her head and one takes her on the nose. And her voice dies away like a baby bird falling out of a nest. And she stands still—jerking her mouth and the pennies falling all around her. And a cynical-looking youth bounces out and picks them up. Bravo! She tried to bow and slipped. Another round of applause for that. All right, take her away. What did she sing? What was the song that mumbled itself through the laughter ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... 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 ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... dog, or a whole pack beside him—"gaudet canibus." This attachment to the dog is given us "from above," and is one of the many "good gifts" which proceed from Him, who made man and dog "familiar," as the apt specific name of Linnaeus denominates the latter. One of our greatly-gifted poets, in a cynical mood, could write an epitaph on a favourite Newfoundlander, and end it with the dismal lines on ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... explain it as self-interest in her; numberless things proved the contrary. Alice was still his slave, though he had not given himself the slightest trouble to preserve even her respect. He had shown himself to her freely as he was, jocosely cynical on everything that women prize, brutal when he chose to give way to his temper, faithless on principle, selfish to the core; perhaps the secret of the fascination he exercised over her was his very ingenuousness, ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... there can be no question. The Imperialism of Kipling was equally remote from the Victorian caution and the Victorian idealism: and our subject does quite seriously end here. The world was full of the trampling of totally new forces, gold was sighted from far in a sort of cynical romanticism: the guns opened across Africa; ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... an hour Ethelbertha retired from the contest, hot, dirty, and a trifle irritable. The fireplace retained the same cold, cynical expression with which it had ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome |
