"Cynical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... breathe the cynical atmosphere of wits and journalists, the atmosphere of the theatre and of the ministry. It is a vast sea in which thousands are casting their nets! You must either continue this existence, or blow your ...
— Mercadet - A Comedy In Three Acts • Honore De Balzac
... flapping with frenzied desperation, before toppling suddenly, helplessly, pathetically, as the big pinions stopped, and she collapsed sideways back to earth again, where, blood-smeared and glaring, lit by the merciless, cynical moon, she crouched and coughed—as I live, coughed and coughed and coughed, a ghastly cough like a baby's, till it seemed as if she would cough ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... to console the irate woman. It was just a passing whim of Rafael's! Boys will be boys! You've got to let them have a good time now and then! What do you expect with a handsome fellow like that and from the best family in the region! And the cynical old man, accustomed to easy conquests in the suburbs, blinked maliciously, taking it for granted that Rafael had won a complete triumph down at the Blue House. How else explain the youth's assiduity in his visits there, and his ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... We resolutely put from us sober signs, serious thoughts, and sometimes are really angry with those who exhibit life as it is, and who urge us to seek reconciliation with it. When the physician prescribed blisters to Marie Bashkirtseff to check her consumptive tendency, the vain, cynical girl wrote, "I will put on as many blisters as thee like. I shall be able to hide the mark by bodices brimmed with flowers and lace and tulle, and a thousand other delightful things that are worn, without being required; it may even ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... a cynical glance, and nodded to one of the marines. The latter stepped forward and began searching the boys, Ralph being the first to undergo the ordeal; several letters, a few trinkets, a knife and a purse, containing all the boy possessed, were removed. The coat when thrown back revealed ...
— The Boy Volunteers with the Submarine Fleet • Kenneth Ward
... more than one reminder that the world is a small place. I met a burly negro in a cart, and fell into talk with him about the Florida climate, an endless topic, out of which a cynical traveler may easily extract almost endless amusement. How abput the summers here? I inquired. Were they really as paradisaical (I did not use that word) as some reports would lead one to suppose? The man smiled, as if he had heard something like that before. He did not think the ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... 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 betrayed in larger characters ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... with something like terror—the aspect of death about its base and that cynical glimmer of sunlight at its top. I flung the throttle open, and we leaped forward through the river hush. I wanted to get away from this thing that had seen so much of life and cared so little. ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... in fact it was the only spot for miles round that had never owned the sway of Baron von Grunewald, and none of them were well enough provided with brains to venture a plan for its successful reduction. A cynical smile played round the lips of their over-lord, as he saw the problem had overmatched ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... answered David, with a quiet and somewhat cynical smile, "he wasna beggin', puir lad, but I took peety on 'im, an' gee'd 'im some bawbees. So this is yer new convert, is he? an' he's to be my guide? He'll do. He'll do. Sae I'll bid ye guid-nicht, ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... said woman 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 ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... chain of evidence, clearly demonstrating the agony of his literary feelings. The cynical Wood tells us that, "not finding that preferment he expected, while others for their money carried away most places, he retired discontented into Surrey." And his panegyrist, Sprat, describes him as "weary ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... driven to temporarily assume the form of an animal, by the aid of the Black Art, in order to satisfy their overpowering lust for blood. This belief, which seeks to account for the extraordinary rapacity of an animal by tracing its origin to a human being, would seem to be based upon an extremely cynical appreciation of the blood-thirsty character of our race. The white man and the brown, the yellow and the black, independently, and without receiving the idea from one another, have all found the same explanation for the ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... friends. Holmes drew a line around him, within which he shone like a winter sun, and outside of which his care did not extend. The one was best in what he did, the other in what he was. Holmes always seemed to me cynical to the general world; Lowell to have embodied the antique sentiment, "I am a man, and hold nothing human as indifferent to me." Both were adored by those around them, and the adoration kindled Holmes to a warmer reflection to the adorers; Lowell felt it as ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... big mouthed, shifty, kind of man, 'bout as cynical lookin' in the face as a black bass, and full of wind as a toad fish. I exchanged drinks for principles of socialism, and doin' so happened to display my roll. Murdock slipped away and made talk with a friend, then, when Heegan had left, he steers me ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... her pocket, and opened it. It showed the portrait of a young man with the sombre eyes and cynical mouth of the northern European, a face revealing intellect, will, passion, and much recklessness. Eyes and hair were dark, the face smooth but for ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... about him at last were rather those of defrauding the Jews, who had expressed themselves to him with brutal audacity, than that of punishing the one son or doing justice to the other; but even of them he spoke with a cynical good-humor, triumphing in his idea of thoroughly getting ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... Gibbon, yet it is certain that he carefully avoided the monotonous stateliness and the elaborate and ostentatious art of that most erudite historian. I look in vain for his model in the skeptical Gibbon, the cynical Bolingbroke, or the gorgeous Burke. These were all to him intellectual giants; but giants of false belief and practice. Not even from Tacitus, upon whom he looked with the greatest favor, could he have acquired his ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... sitting up, leaning back against a pile of pillows; and he greeted them with a smile—the half-sad, half-patiently cynical smile of the old days in Beaumont Buildings—the smile which served as a mask to hide the tenderness of ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... stands bewildered, and weeps her unavailing tears. Sometimes, on the other hand, they are gloomy, sad, silent. Perhaps they are morose. Worse still, they are whining, fretful, complaining. You would even call them sour. Often they are cynical and disagreeable. But be not too hasty, too sweeping, too clear-cut. I have seen such men who were the reverse of the Pharisees. Their faces were a tombstone. The portals of their soul were guarded by lions scarcely chained. But though ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... had seen him change, too, or perhaps more truly become himself. Still apparently the old Chris, handsome, poised, cynical, and only too ready to be bored, he went his usual course of golf and polo, gave his men's dinners, kissed Alice good-bye and departed for yachting or motoring trips. Even Alice, shut away from reality in her ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... orchid-growers may well become an incredulous generation. When their judgment leads them wrong we hear of it, the tale is published, and outsiders mock. But these gentlemen receive startling reports continually, honest enough for the most part. Much experience and some loss have made them rather cynical when a new wonder is announced. The particular case of Monsieur St. Leger was complicated by the extreme resemblance which the foliage of Onc. Jonesianum bears to that of Onc. cibolletum, a species almost worthless. ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... society. To Professor Dethick this is, in every sense, a golden opportunity, and he insists that the starvation test shall be thoroughly made. Lord Asgarby, willing to do anything for his idolised daughter, assents to the plan, and his scientific friend, cynical Professor Jopp, agrees, with the assistance of his erudite daughter, to supervise the experiment. Vashti will fast for several days, and the heir of Asgarby will then be healed by ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... success. In all his better stories—for he often wrote poor ones—there was the atmosphere of sincerity, of realism, the marks of an acute observer, without prejudice and with a justifiable leaning toward a belief in the fundamental worth of humanity. Where others were cynical he was just. Where others were sentimental, he had sincere, healthful sentiment. Where others were hysterical, he calmly and accurately described, permitting the tragedy to reveal itself instead of burying ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... a long time since the kindest estimate of Socialism by the average man was that expressed by Ebenezer Elliott, "the Corn-Law Rhymer," in the once familiar cynical doggerel:— ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... proportion, the residuary innocence of spirit still to be remedied on the part of her auditor had their moments of proving too much for her nerves. She went at them just now, these sources of irritation, with an amused energy that it would have been open to Milly to regard as cynical and that was nevertheless called for—as to this the other was distinct—by the way that in certain connections the American mind broke down. It seemed at least—the American mind as sitting there thrilled and dazzled in Milly—not to understand English society without ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... these transactions, how ill they bore to find themselves superseded and the State managed over their heads. Fashionable society was equally furious, and the three allies went by the name of Dynasts, or "Reges Superbi." After resistance had been abandoned, Cicero came back to Rome to make cynical remarks from which all parties suffered equally. His special grievance was the want of consideration which he conceived to have been shown for himself. He mocked at the Senate; he mocked at Bibulus, whom he particularly abominated; he mocked at Pompey and the agrarian law. Mockery ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... strange powers, and to be, generally, such "kittle cattle" to deal with, that the king, learning that these strangers were bent upon entering the territory of his white neighbours, ultimately came to the somewhat cynical conclusion that he could kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, by allowing the formidable strangers to go their way and inflict the maximum amount of annoyance and damage upon his especial enemies before those enemies in their turn ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... 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 ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... woman standing erect and unflinching upon the deck, as the shells were whistling and bursting over us, while her lawful protector would be cowering "under the lee" of a cotton bale. I pay this humble tribute of admiration to the sex, but a cynical old bachelor, to whom I once made the observation, replied that in his opinion their insatiable curiosity prevailed even over their ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... the scowl which was coming to be a habit transformed itself into a cynical smile. A hundred or more of the MacMorrogh laborers, hats off and standing at respectful attention, were clustered about the rear platform of the private car, and Mr. Colbrith was addressing them; giving them the presidential benediction, as Frisbie ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... best and most famous of English political economists, who knows existing conditions and has doubtless a clear insight into the movement of bourgeois society, a pupil of the cynical Ricardo,[9] ventured at a public lecture, amidst applause, to apply to political economy what Bacon said of philosophy: "The man who with true and untiring wisdom suspends his judgment, who progresses gradually, surmounting one after the other the obstacles which impede like mountains ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... leaving sweet thoughts for Mrs Quantock, he would probably be taking away the brandy bottle for himself. But Georgie knew he was only too apt to indulge In secret cynicisms and perhaps there was no brandy to take away by this time ... and lo and behold, he was being cynical again. ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... her obvious childish pleasure communicated itself to me. The spirit of youth in her knocked on my rather jaded heart, and I opened to it. That was beautiful and strange. I talked with her, and I felt myself younger, ingenuous rather than cynical, inclined even to a radiant, though foolish, optimism. She was very natural, very imperfect in worldly education, full of fragmentary but decisive views on life, quite unabashed in giving them forth, quite inconsiderate in ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... but the women seem to be a little afraid of him. They say he is so terribly cynical and satirical. He goes into society a good bit, although he says it bores him. He says he only goes because it would bore him worse to stay ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... looking about himself from under his thick, knitted eyebrows, walk about for days, angry and morose, as though silently asking something, which he feared to ask aloud. They awakened his other soul, the turbulent and lustful soul of a hungry beast. Insolent and cynical, he drank, led a depraved life, and made drunkards of other people. He went into ecstasy, and something like a volcano of filth boiled within him. It looked as though he was madly tearing the chains which he himself had forged ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... man is that his mind does not change. Well, I admit we septuagenarians are set in our ways. We have lived our lives, felt, suffered, rejoiced, and perhaps grown a little tolerant, a little apathetic. The young people call it cynical; yet it is not cynicism—only a large charity for the failings, the shortcomings of others. So what I am about to say in this letter must not be set down as either garrulity or senile cynicism. It is the result of a ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... the square, excited figure of the General, who kept marching aimlessly up and down between the calycanthus bushes, put the restraint of a terrible embarrassment upon my words. Tell her I must, and yet how could I tell her while the little cynical bloodshot eyes of the great man were ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... to his feet and stood with his arms folded, looking wearily down at her. His mouth had fallen into rather cynical lines and there were puckers at the corners of his eyes. "Oh, a big, fair young man—a rosy ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... "Now I presume everybody trustworthy until it's proven otherwise. Time was, and not so long ago, when I was more than cynical; and I found it didn't pay in a woman. A man may be cynical and get away with it; a woman only injures her complexion, and makes trouble for herself. Me for the happy spirit, and ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... disgust. Jean was not less compliant; a second time the poor girl submitted to the fascination of the man whom she did not love, and whom she had so cruelly insulted little more than a year ago; and, though Burns took advantage of her weakness, it was in the ugliest and most cynical spirit, and with a heart absolutely indifferent. Judge of this by a letter written some twenty days after his return—a letter to my mind among the most degrading in the whole collection—a letter which seems to have been inspired by a boastful, libertine bagman. "I am afraid," it goes, "I have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a moment gazing into vacancy with a half-tender, half-cynical smile on his lips. Then he extinguished the lamp, called Olga from her resting-place on the old divan, and went ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... has come to me. I worship Dicky. He sweeps me off my feet with his love, his vivid personality overpowers my more commonplace self, but through all the bewildering intoxication of my engagement and marriage a little mocking devil, a cool, cynical, little devil, is constantly whispering in my ear: "You fool, you fool, to imagine you can escape unhappiness! There is no such thing as ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... men and enjoy a personal dignity and independence unknown to women anywhere else — why do you want to come here? Do you not know that the foundations of that liberty which makes you envied in the old world are laid in the respect and confidence of men? Undermine that, become wise and cynical, learn the meaning of doubtful words and gestures whose significance you never need have suspected, meet men on the same ground where they may any day meet fast women of the continent, and fix at that moment on your free limbs the same chains which corrupt society has forged ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... for his, crapulous; licentious, shameless life. His military efficiency at important emergencies was impaired and his life endangered by vile diseases. He was covetous and greedy beyond what was considered decent even in that cynical age. He received subsidies and alms with both hands from those who distrusted and despised him, but who could not eject him ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... unfortunate, perhaps, that he selected Maltby as his ideal character. That gentleman was considered by critics a masterly portrait of the cynical roue. But it was the ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... in its varied form of praise, appreciation and kindness, giving help as appreciation and kindness, are the weak and strong aspects of the fellowship feelings. It is a cynical view of life, perhaps, but it is probably true that the weak phase is more common and more constant than the second. Almost everybody loves praise and appreciation, for these enlarge the ego feeling, and some, perhaps most, like to be helped, though ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... Mr. Ives' strenuous efforts to get permission for the men left behind to go soon, had met with a curt refusal from the Commandant at Frankfort. "When England returns our men, not before, and she had better be quick about it," said he. But how true is Rochefoucauld's cynical epigram—"Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d'Autrui!" Even our sympathy with, and sorrow for, those left in Altheim could not damp the joy we felt to be free again; and when we quitted Goch, the German frontier station, ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... my eyes, to be able to open them suddenly and realise—with fresh acuteness—his infinite variety. There was to me something poignant about his loveliness like an open rose in whose very perfection lies the herald of doom. I loved him too much. The cynical masterpieces of the past looking at his beauty smiled in satisfied revenge for they knew that he was alive and that life means death. Love gives ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... ball were not favorable to its 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 ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... 'loading.' After all, 'exageration' only substitutes the idea of mound, or agger for carica—the heaping up of a mound—for the common Italian word 'load' or 'cartload.' One can easily understand how a cold, cynical, and hating Neapolitan, pushed about by the police for a likeness much too like, would shrug his shoulders, and say, possibly, the likeness was loaded. But when we look at the character of the loading, there may be ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... of a certain cynical tendency to deride the value of a bite that I have decided to spend the evening with my pen. 'A bite!' says somebody, with a fine guffaw. 'And what on earth is the good of a bite, I should like to know? A bite is neither fish, flesh, ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... had noticed for the first time that Silas Meadowcroft's left hand was strapped up with surgical plaster; and I now further observed that John Jago's wandering brown eyes, furtively looking at everybody round the table in turn, looked with a curious, cynical scrutiny at ...
— The Dead Alive • Wilkie Collins
... emerged from the War a changed nation. The people who in 1870 made ribald verses and sang cynical songs over the plight of their country are now no more, and France emerges serious, resolute, to the great work which she has before her — of building the great first Democratic State of Europe and becoming the corner-stone of ...
— NEVER AGAIN • Edward Carpenter
... father," she said, startled by the question, for at that moment she had seen him in imagination as clearly as if he were present. She had seen him leaning against the door-post, a half-cynical, half-kindly smile floating through his gold moustache. "Do you think he will like the music you are going to give at the next concert? He ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... dropped one day at rehearsal, gave her a clue to things. Gail had been stating to one of the teachers, who played Fleta, one of the leaders of the chorus, that she'd had four proposals that summer. Gail's attitude of cynical frankness about her desire to collect scalps was something to make the average person gasp. She really meant it. She was, as Joy had discovered by this time, quite ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... 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 that, as we all uncovered, ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... Valliere, thoughtfully, for this cynical frankness appeared to her an offense both to ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... boyhood. Then Cranston and the other troop leaders got to working down toward the agency and, during the rests, moving close up to the corral and watching the riding-school. It was capital work, said Cranston and his contemporaries, though some jealous youngsters used to say to their cynical selves that Parson probably "put up a prayer-meeting as a stand-off." McPhail and his people began to come out and look on, and Mira to watch from the window, for she still trembled and shrank at sight of the savage painted faces and glittering eyes of ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... he had talked so entertainingly of the places he had seen—the peoples and their customs—the wild beasts; and he had always had a droll way of drawing striking comparisons between savage animals and civilized men that showed a considerable knowledge of the former, and a keen, though somewhat cynical, ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... any charges against him? Maybe I want to ask his advice. Maybe he could help us straighten out this thing. Got to pull together, haven't we?" A cynical light in the eyes of the young man ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... his head to hide a cynical smile. He had good reasons for thinking it was not the one he had flung out ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... of the jurymen, that his thoughts appeared to be theirs, expressed in the same simple words and quaint illustrations which they would have used if asked to give their opinions on the case. It is to be added, that Mason's almost cynical disregard of ornament in his addresses to the jury gave to an opponent like Webster the advantage of availing himself of those real ornaments of speech which spring directly from a great heart and imagination. ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... But this cynical phase did not last long, and gave way in turn to a much more serious view of life than I had hitherto taken. The trip which I made to California with my father did much to promote this. We were absent from home eight weeks, and we visited all the principal cities and saw ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... also in these days here become cynical! It was not so when I was young. Here's to the ever young," and he bowed to Carmen ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... where he was content to stand and knock, waiting in perfect, reverential patience until the mysterious door ahead of him should open just a very little wider. To the outward eye, he was languid, indifferent, a little cynical and prone to boredom. Underneath it, though, the fires of his enthusiasm, of his ambition to advance, not his own career, but the sum total of scientific knowledge: this fire was burning at white heat. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... promise, boy." A whimsical, half-cynical smile touched Leroy's eyes. "You see, after living like a devil for thirty years, I want to die like a Christian. Now, ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... to some English children. Her employers had not been kind to her, and in a country where comforts were few she had had less than her share of them. She was a girl of twenty then, and very pretty, and hers was a faithful heart; and, cynical as the expression may sound, she had had fidelity thrust upon her by the fact that she was utterly friendless in the world. When Purvis married her she went to him gladly. When he deserted her she even pretended ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... lawless desires which he seeks to divert, but fails, from the things of the flesh and of the world to the things of the reason; supersensuous desires for the beautiful and intangible, which he strives to crush, but in vain, with the cynical scepticism of science, which derides the things it cannot grasp. In this strange Faustus, made up of so many and conflicting instincts; in this old man with ever-budding and ever-nipped feelings of youthfulness, muddling the ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... irrelevance! I have not read Goethe lately. Mephistopheles, I suppose. But I did not mean to be cynical." ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... watching the proceedings with cynical curiosity, was the most amazed of the amazed ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... experience. And he is a devil, not the Devil, conceived as the bitter and malignant enemy of God, but a subordinate spirit whose business it is, in the world-economy, to spur man to activity. This he does partly by cynical criticism and opposition, but more especially by holding out the lures of the sensual life. At first Mephistopheles was not thought of as working solely for a reward in the shape of souls captured for eternity, but as playing his part for the diabolical pleasure ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... sharp click of the office gate. Inside the railing stood a slender man of medium height, slightly stooped forward. On his left arm hung a light overcoat. From a smooth face, with a mouth whose thin lips oscillated between assumed determination and cynical half-smiles, a pair of grey eyes twinkled with a humorously tolerant endurance of ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... other stories. There was once a king who was very fond of listening to stories, like the king in the Arabian Nights. The only difference was that, unlike that cynical Oriental, this king believed all the stories that he heard. It is hardly necessary to add that he lived in England. His face had not the swarthy secrecy of the tyrant of the thousand tales; on the contrary, his eyes were as big ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... inner light of Pilgrim and Quaker colonists; it gleams no less in the faces of the children of Russian Jew immigrants to-day. American irreverence has been noted by many a foreign critic, but there are certain subjects in whose presence our reckless or cynical speech is hushed. Compared with current Continental humor, our characteristic American humor is peculiarly reverent. The purity of woman and the reality of religion are not considered topics for jocosity. Cleanness of body and of mind are held by our young men to be not only desirable ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... charms that they are not at all chary of them. It is certainly generous to us miserable blackcoats. But, do you know, it strikes me as a generosity of display that must necessarily leave the donor poorer in maidenly feeling." We thought ourselves cynical, but this was intolerable; and in a very crisp ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... "'But her cynical glance and harsh smile were of a hag, of a witch, an enchantress, a Fate, a—I know not what! There was something about her to justify fully the aversion and fright which I had been caused all my life long by women walking alone in ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... be his procuress Small matter which human folly had dilated into a great one Smooth words, in the plentiful lack of any substantial So much in advance of his time as to favor religious equality Stroke of a broken table knife sharpened on a carriage wheel That cynical commerce in human lives The defence of the civil authority against the priesthood The assassin, tortured and torn by four horses The truth in shortest about matters of importance The voice of slanderers The Catholic League and the Protestant Union ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of life that had already produced the gravest lesions on his liver and nervous system. His imagination presented him with idyllic pictures of the life of the reformed rake. He would never be sentimental with her, or silly; but always a little cynical and bitter, as became the past. Yet he was sure she would have an intuition of his real greatness and goodness. And in due course he would confess things to her, pour his version of what he regarded as his wickedness—showing what a complex of Goethe, and Benvenuto Cellini, ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... itself wings," answered the cynical stranger; "but I am not quite sure we have it even now. You make a great show, indeed, with building and cultivation; but stock is not capital, any more than the fat of a corpulent man is health ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... you know the cynical saying here. As Nature provides an antidote growing in the same district with every poison, all we have to do is to learn how to seek it. So when the Egyptian was placed on the Nile the hippopotamus was created to provide whips to rule him ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... a cynical morning in interviews with people who were supposed to know about missing luggage. Both they and we were aware that the first hospital which got a wandering packing-case froze on to it, and if inconvenient people came to hunt for their ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... Eighteen Hundred Thirty-seven, the outlaws, Ann and Wendell, were married. It was a quiet wedding—guests were not invited because it was not pleasant to court cynical regrets, and kinsmen were ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... faint, cynical smile. "No," he said, "you certainly don't know everything, my son. You never have come a cropper in ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the original Antiquary of Monkbarns. He had been present, I think, at the trial at Carlisle, and seldom mentioned the venerable judges charge to the jury, without shedding tears,—which had peculiar pathos, as flowing down features, carrying rather a sarcastic or almost a cynical expression. ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... sprang to his feet. As he did so, he raised his single glass to his eye, and looked fixedly across the House to the spot where the member for Elgin was slowly composing himself after his mighty effort. For some seconds Disraeli, with an air of cold, cynical aloofness, continued to gaze at the unfortunate man. Then, with a favourite action, he suddenly dropped the glass from his eye, and, waving his hand with an airy gesture of contempt, said, "I shall not detain the House, sir, by referring to the—the exhibition we have just ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... to 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 those mothers, who declare themselves above all things ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... man, trained, cynical, an arrogant production of the city, what this woman had been to him. She alone of all the human beings in the world had clung to him faithfully. She had borne and bred, and now she cherished him, and for one who could see beneath the shell and see the mind and soul, she was wonderfully ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... Trench, Spedding, Spring Rice, Charles Buller, Maurice, Monckton Milnes, J. M. Kemble, Brookfield, Thompson. With none of them does he seem in his undergraduate days to have been intimate. Probably then, as afterwards, he shrank from camaraderie, shared Byron's distaste for "enthusymusy"; naturally cynical and self- contained, was repelled by the spiritual fervour, incessant logical collision, aggressive tilting at abuses ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... for her. But us lot aren't widows and orphans. No one's going to be sorry for us or care a hang what we've been let in for. The longer we stay, the longer we won't be paid." He was not a particularly depraved or cynical young footman but he laughed a little at the end of his speech. "There's the Marquis," he added. "He's been running in and out long enough to make a good bit of talk. Now's his time to ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... in the arts of intrigue and betrayal, whose duplicity as if at times intolerable to his self-knowledge worked itself off in bursts of cynical openness. "I did hurry on the formation of the proscribing commission and took its presidency. And do you know why? Simply from fear that if I did not take it quickly into my hands my own name would head the list of the proscribed. Such are the times in which we live. But I am minister ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... to the influence of Bute and the court, and to a desire to injure a political opponent and gratify a powerful supporter. The feeling was strengthened by the characters of the two disputants, for Portland was a man of high reputation, Lowther a cynical tyrant. On February 17, 1768, Sir George Savile, a great Yorkshire landowner and a member of the Rockingham party, whose integrity and wealth gave him weight in the house, brought in a bill called the Nullum tempus bill, to make sixty years' possession a bar to claims of the crown. It was ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... Brett, with the cynical smile which so often disconcerted glib liars like Petit. "It is hopeless to expect you to tell the truth. However, I think I know a way to clear your wits. You must be brought face to face with ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... has been sneering at us all in his dreadful cynical way, and knocked her up into one of her awful headaches,' said Nuttie, who felt extremely angered by the grave tone of rebuke in the letter, and tossed it over to her aunt without absolutely reading it all. Miss Headworth was a good deal distressed, and anxious to ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... white light shaking and darting across the black sky like a gleaming sword; the man on the sidewalk looking backward with a startled glance; the big drops of rain falling sidelong in the wind—these were all reproduced on the canvas. His later pictures were characterized by a cynical tendency, which I observed with regret. It was evident that his sensitive mind had taken impressions from its brief contact with men, which were sadly affecting ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... incomparable rhythm! I like to think that he gave the spectators an idea that Valentine's self-sacrifice for Angelica was nothing but a bold device, a calculated effect; otherwise the sacrifice is an excrescence in this comedy, which, popular and broad though it be, is cynical in Congreve's manner throughout. One is consoled, however, by the pleasant fate of the ingenious Mr. Tattle and the intriguing Mrs. Frail, who are left tied for life against their will. The trick, by the way, of a tricked marriage is constant in Congreve, and reveals his poverty of construction. ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... differences, and swear to stand by one another, in weal or woe, to the end of the enterprise. My readers must doubtless perceive how completely I have altered my tone and deportment since we first set out together. I warrant they then thought me a crabbed, cynical, impertinent little son of a Dutchman; for I scarcely ever gave them a civil word, nor so much as touched my beaver, when I had occasion to address them. But as we jogged along together on the high road of my history, I gradually began to relax, to ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... a quick, cynical approval and, with a sudden turn, executed a deep bow to the Pearl, one hand on the heart, expressing gallantry, fealty, the humblest admiration; all these sincere and yet permeated with a ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... thought, and thus their bones are bleaching, and the memory of their names has flown away like a mephitic vapour that was better dispersed. Are there many like me, I wonder, who have not only done nothing to battle with the mightiest modern evil, but have half encouraged it through cynical recklessness and pessimism? We entrap the poor and the base and the wretched to their deaths, and then we cry out about their vicious tendencies, and their improvidence, and all the rest. Heaven knows I have no right to sermonize; but, at least, I never shammed anything. When I saw some spectacle ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... however. Never a one of them but hoped some day he might lay hands upon the rug and dispose of it to some other madman. A rug valued at seventy thousand dollars was worth a high adventure. Cleigh, however, with cynical humour courted ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... almost at the same moment that his own touched Marco. Under the nodding plumes each saw the rather tired and cynical pale face, a sketch of which was hidden in ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... upon Malcolm Sage; but with varying expressions. Those of the schoolmaster were frankly cynical. The inspector and Freynes looked as if they expected to see produced from the attache-case a guinea-pig or a white rabbit, pink-eyed and kicking; whilst the vicar had obviously not yet recovered from his surprise at discovering that the stranger, ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... fifth Homer[28] held the Greeks in view; Solid, tho' rough, yet incorrect as new. Lucilius, warm'd with more than mortal flame Rose next[29], and held a torch to ev'ry shame. See stern Menippus, cynical, unclean; And Grecian Cento's, mannerly obscene. Add the last efforts of Pacuvius' rage, And the chaste decency of ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... the priest replied. "It is not for your kind." But he took the kopecks of an old peasant woman. "Rub it on your joints and it will cure their stiffness," he said to her, with a cynical smile. ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... is absolutely no possible theoretic escape. Whether, like Renan, we look upon life in a more refined way, as a romance of the spirit; or whether, like the friends of M. Zola, we pique ourselves on our 'scientific' and 'analytic' character, and prefer to be cynical, and call the world a 'roman experimental' on an infinite scale,—in either case the world appears to us potentially as what the same Carlyle once called it, a vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... lazily-cynical way, "do you think if you or I were in a fit that her Ladyship would run? Bah! these are the things that shake one's faith in human nature. I feel infernally seedy. That cursed Channel passage—I tremble in my inmost stomach when I think of it. Get ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... I had heard things almost as desperately cynical in other newspaper offices before that, and I could not see what was so distinctively Bohemian in these 'anime prave', these souls so baleful by their own showing. But apparently Bohemia was not a state that you could well imagine from ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... keen to obtain results. The youngest and most cynical pessimist must have had cause for wonder to see a body of healthy and not unintellectual men striving thus single-mindedly to add their small quota of scientific and geographical knowledge to the sum total of the world—with no immediate prospect ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... the Homeric traditions, and adopts the late myths which denied that Helen ever went to Troy. She remained in Egypt, and Achaeans and Trojans fought for a mere shadow, formed by the Gods out of clouds and wind. In the "Cyclops" of Euripides, a satirical drama, the cynical giant is allowed to speak of Helen in a strain of coarse banter. Perhaps the essay of Isocrates on Helen may be regarded as a kind of answer to the attacks of several speakers in the works of the tragedians. Isocrates defends Helen simply ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... the big desk in two with its solid and clean-edged brilliance; with its hot brilliance in which a swarm of flies hovered in dancing flight over some dirty plate forgotten there amongst yellow papers for many a day. And towards the evening the cynical ray seemed to cling to the ragged petticoat, lingered on it with wicked enjoyment of that misery it had exposed all day; lingered on the corner of the dusty bookshelf, in a red glow intense and mocking, till ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... as this you hope to challenge the respect and get a hold on the intellect of a cynical world? Is it through such instrumentality you would bring home the Church's message to proud and festering humanity? No one can succeed who attempts more than one ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... view that healthy intellects have hitherto declined to entertain. Its advocates have been met with neglect, contempt, or castigation, not with arguments. They have been pitied as insane, avoided as cynical, or passed over as frivolous. And yet, but for one reason, to that whole European world whose progress we are now inheriting, this view would have seemed not only not untenable, but even obvious. The emptiness of the things of this life, ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... counting the cost, but because he knew what poverty meant, and a fellow-feeling made him kind. Even in Venice he set aside a fixed sum for charitable purposes. It was to his credit that neither libertinism nor disgrace nor remorse withered at its root this herb of grace. Cynical speeches with regard to friends and friendship, often quoted to his disadvantage, need not be taken too literally. Byron talked for effect, and in accordance with the whim of the moment. His acts do not correspond with his words. Byron rejected ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... difficulty, like a Bourbon; but many years' experience had at last convinced her that her daughter's occasional mocking mannerism had to be put up with. Conceivably there were people in the world who might have liked this mild cynical way of Carlisle's, seeing in it, not indeed a good quality, but, so to say, the seamy side of a good quality; the lingering outpost of a good quality that had been routed; at least the headstone over the grave of a good quality that maybe was only buried alive. ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... criticisms; they never presumed on their hospitality, but left her as free as though her age had been twice what it was. Undoubtedly, in the ardour of her gratitude she idealized every one of them. The sole reproach which in secret she would formulate against them had reference to their quasi- cynical levity in conversation. They would never treat a serious topic seriously for more than a few minutes. Either one or another would yield to the temptation of clever facetiousness, and clever facetiousness would always carry off the honours in a discussion. This did not apply to Mrs. Orgreave, ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... is well paid and holds his position, whatever it may be, by a less precarious tenure than his American congener. He rather moves than "dabbles" in literature, and not uncommonly takes a hand at some of the many forms of art. On the whole, he is a good fellow, too, with a skeptical mind, a cynical tongue, and a warm heart. I found these men agreeable, hospitable, intelligent, amusing. We worked too hard, dined too well, frequented too many clubs, and went to bed too late in the forenoon. We were overmuch addicted to shedding the blood of the grape. In short, we diligently, conscientiously, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... his pristine courage. That, for some cause wholly hidden from me, the mysterious utterance had shaken his nature to its deepest foundations, was made plainer by his endeavour to treat the whole business with a sort of cynical levity. ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... 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, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... 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 thinking ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... neighbours. More than once he deliberately recommended wickedness so horrible that wicked men recoiled from it with indignation. But they could not succeed even in making their scruples intelligible to him. To every remonstrance he listened with a cynical sneer, wondering within himself whether those who lectured him were such fools as they professed to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... my own—and that only for a time! But when I slept on it the feeling changed, and its aspect is now not half bad. It is now under another classification—under a much more important label—proprietorship. If I were writing philosophy, I should here put in a cynical remark: ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... has the narrow, parsonical, cynical contempt for the understanding of the lower classes prevailed—through our fault—a reversal to blind worship of the masses, of the immature and the unsuccessful, is not inexcusable. We are here to love mankind—all mankind, the outcast as well ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... gen'lm'n as vas to be set down at Doory-lane.—Now, sir, make haste, if you please,' he added, opening the door, and assisting Dumps out with as much coolness as if it was 'all right.' Dumps's indignation was for once getting the better of his cynical equanimity. 'Drury-lane!' he gasped, with the voice of a boy in a cold bath for the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... cynical moments, indeed, he sometimes said that "if you have a valuable man in your employ, you must keep him poor; otherwise you'll lose him." But in so saying he perhaps did himself an injustice. He was apt to feign a heartless selfishness that he did ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... faith and his sympathy with his people are qualities which, even in our altered times, may still retain their place in the economy of the world. Westminster Abbey, so we hear it said, sometimes with a cynical sneer, sometimes with a timorous scruple, has admitted within its walls many who have been great without being good, noble with a nobleness of the earth earthy, worldly with the wisdom of this world. But it ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... and then softened for a moment, while his lips quivered; but his hard, cynical, bitter aspect and tones came back—the manner born of years of misery and ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... not for 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.
... firmness and resolve. Firm thin lips, handsomely moustached; when parted, displaying teeth well set and of dazzling whiteness. A face that might be called beautiful; and yet its beauty was of that negative order which we admire in the serpent and the pard. The smile was cynical; the eye cold, yet bright; but the brightness was altogether animal—more the light of instinct than intellect. A face that presented in its expression a strange admixture of the lovely and the hideous—physically ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... he would think her bold and silly, yet she had only meant to be kind, to comfort him because she pitied him. Now, she was painfully conscious that Marshall was standing near, coolly observant, with a cynical smile upon his thin lips. It was a curious fact, which Amy instantly recognized, that this master of whom so many people stood in awe should himself stand in ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... to talk to Prothero. He liked Addy. She had an amusing face with a long nose and wide lips, restless and cynical. She confided to him the trouble of her life, the eternal difficulty of finding anywhere a permanent ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... released his hold of her wrist nor did he, until he had led her from the room back to the library. Then he released the girl, standing between her and the door, with folded arms and that cynical, quiet, contemptuous smile of ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... the mate contemptuously, for Cupples, although a kind-hearted man, was somewhat cynical and had not a particle of sentiment in his soul. Indeed he showed so little of this that Larry was wont to say he "didn't belave he had a sowl at all, but was only a koorious specimen of ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... little town, it happened that while passing through the town of La Ferte, Jeanne rode between the Archbishop of Rheims and Dunois. The Archbishop had never been friendly to the Maid, and now it was clear, watched her with that half satirical, half amused look of the wise man, curious and cynical in presence of the incomprehensible, observing her ways and very ready to catch her tripping and to entangle her if possible in her own words. The people thronged the way, full of enthusiasm, acclaiming ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... know the meaning of 'Loquaces si sapiat vitet.' Listen," continued Cottrell: "the Latin is a comprehensive language, remember,—'Si,' if; 'sapiat,' you are not a fool; 'vitet,' have nothing to say to; 'loquaces,' ladies' commissions. A wickedly cynical saying to have broidered on one's case, even if you have found ladies' commissions troublesome and productive of much inconvenience. But, dear me! Lady Mary is signalling me. I must go and see what it is she wants. Try if you can make him disclose the story of that case, and ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... very cynical, or very blase, or wholly possessed by some other uncomfortable quality, who does not feel much cheered and invigorated by morning sunbeams pouring into a strange bed-room, and awakening him to new scenes and unexperienced ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... hear old cynical Macloud preaching optimism!" laughed Croyden—"our last talk, in Northumberland, wasn't particularly in that ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... literary men were all hard drinkers. They followed the fashion, and the memoirs of the period are quite edifying on that subject. At the present day they are gastronomes, and it is a step in the right direction. I by no means agree with the cynical Geoffroy, who used to say that if our modern writings are weak, it is because literary men now drink nothing stronger than lemonade. The present age is rich in talents, and the very number of books probably interferes with their proper appreciation; ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... future. You evidently imagine that I have gone in for the fashionable creed of the young man of the present day. I am not young enough to take pleasure in high collars and cheap cynicism, Miss Deyncourt. Cynical people are never disappointed in others, as I so often am, because they expect the worst. In theory I respect and admire my fellow-creatures, but they continually exasperate me because they won't allow me to do so in real life. I have ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... and subtleties that ought to have lasted them through a quarter of a life-time. But I think it is possible that the English reader might gather from this little book an unduly strong impression of the uniformity of Island life. The loves of white men and brown women, often cynical and brutal, sometimes exquisitely tender and pathetic, necessarily fill a large space in any true picture of the South Sea Islands, and Mr Becke, no doubt of set artistic purpose, has confined ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... enormous longing after the highest and best in all shapes—a longing which haunts me and is the demon which ever impels me to work, and will let me have no rest unless I am doing his behests. The honours of men I value so far as they are evidences of power, but with the cynical mistrust of their judgment and my own worthiness, which always haunts me, I put very little faith in them. Their praise makes me sneer inwardly. God forgive me if I ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... Middle Ages, whose triumph we have seen on the cloister wall at Pisa, the Lord Death. His fleshless face peers from behind a bush at Zatzinger's stunted, fever-stricken lady and imbecile gentleman; he sits grinning on a tree in Orso Grafs allegory, while the cynical knights, with haggard, sensual faces, crack dirty jokes with the fat, brutish woman squatted below; he puts his hand into the basket of Duerer's tattered pedlar; he leers hideously at the stirrup of Duerer's armed and stalwart knight. No gods of youth and nature, no Hercules, no Hermes, no ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... age; a strong, mature woman, but quite feminine where her heart or sense of beauty are concerned. Her eyes are wide apart. Has a dazzling smile, which she knows how to use on occasion. Also, on occasion, she can be firm and hard, even cynical An intellectual woman, and at the same time a very womanly woman, capable of sudden tendernesses, flashes of emotion, and abrupt actions. She is a finished product of high culture and refinement, and at the same time possesses robust vitality and instinctive right-promptings that augur ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... was annoyed; there was something too much like a scene in the attitude and tears of his former slave. He leaned back in his chair, regarding her with a glance of cynical impatience. She caught the look, as her hands fell apart; and the hot blood that rushed over her face seemed to burn up her tears. She broke into a smile, and arose, sweeping a hand across her eyes fiercely, as if to punish them ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... 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 with on their lands, pillaged, ravaged, and burned out ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... and that it was the duty of every Englishman to keep on good terms with Him. The mystery of divinity never entered his head. It was a simple, steadfast faith, peculiar if you like, but unyielding in devotional loyalty to His supremacy. It was a wonderful phenomenon, which even cynical logicians might have found embarrassing to their iconoclastic notions could they have witnessed it. Here was an uncultured though magnificent-looking person passing through a sorrowful tribulation, exciting ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... 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 on it ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... to an end my second attempt at carving out a career. By now I had grown savage and cynical, rather revengeful also, I fear. Knowing myself to possess considerable abilities in sundry directions, I sat down, as it were, to think things over and digest my past experiences. Then it was that the ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... the wisdom of their counting-houses. The man of the world is perfectly willing to admit that he is no better than you, because he takes it for granted that you will admit yourself to be no better than he. It is a way of avoiding comparison. To Maupassant this cynical point of view was invaluable for his purpose. He wanted to tell stories just for the pleasure of telling them; he wanted to concern himself with his story simply as a story; incidents interested him, not ideas, nor even characters, and he ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... cynical," Rhes said, "but you're promising the best of all possible worlds for everyone. That will be a little hard to deliver when ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison |
