Cynic Quotes

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Collected Essays 5: Philosophy, Autobiography and Miscellany

“A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.”
― H.L. Mencken

“He might have been naive, but he didn't care; he said he's rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Trustful people are the pure at heart, as they are moved by the zeal of their own trustworthiness.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“You are a cynical man, Mr. Pleasant."
"We live in cynical times, Miss Cain.”
― Derek Landy, Death Bringer

“What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“It all depends on what people you're talking about helping. That's the wonderful think about just about every religion on the planet - they're all so incredibly selfish.”
― Derek Landy, Death Bringer

“It's weird, marriage. It's like this license that gives a person the legal right to control their spouse / their 'other half.”
― Jess C. Scott, Blind Leading Another

“That's what I've never been able to get about religion: that charmless combination of altruism and insanity. Give me a cynical, self-interested bastard any day of the week; at least you can play chicken with him and know he'll stick to the rules.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“I am metaphysical being, mystical and emotional, skeptical and cynical, happy and boisterous, loud and bawdy, quiet and melancholy, tender and cruel, full of mirth and despair. Inherent inconsistences mark me as part of nature, which is neither cruel nor fair, or reliable or predictable.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“In the philosophical dialect, a cynic takes an insult as a compliment since opposition is already his style.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The only activity a cynic will find contagious is yawning, that is, with other people, at other people.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not. The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers,
things standing shall fall,
but the moving ever shall stay.”
― Basava, The lord of the meeting rivers: Devotional poems of Basavaṇṇa

“This boy," he said, indicating the paintings with one sweep of his arms, "was romantic. He thought that it was beauty that bound everything together. And for him it was true. Life had been beautiful for him. He was very young. He knew very little of life. He saw beauty but he did not feel any true passion. How could he? He did not know. He had not really encountered the force of beauty's opposite."
"Are you more cynical now, then?" she asked him.
"Cynical," he frowned, "No, not that. I know that there is an ugly side of life-and not just human life. I know that everything is not simply beautiful. I am not a romantic as this boy was. But I am not a cynic either. There is something enduring in all of life, Anne, something tough. Something. Something terribly weak yet incredibly powerful...”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Love

“The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.”
― Diane Setterfield

“A cynic is just a wounded romantic.”
― Pamela Jaye Smith, The Power of the Dark Side: Creating Great Villains, Dangerous Situations, & Dramatic Conflict

“Life was very sad if there were not - and unbearably so if one's experience with romantic love turned one into an incurable cynic.”
― Mary Balogh, At Last Comes Love

“A positive person discusses possibilities. A negative person discusses problems. A cynic is oblivious to positivity and negativity.”
― Debasish Mridha

“The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation. It's sure to be interesting. When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle. However brief.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“I am called a dog because I fawn on those who give me anything, I yelp at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals.”
― Diogenes the Cynic

“It is not only every man for himself but also every man for some men for himself.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Diogenes was a cynic at his best. He was in search of an honest man but not an hones woman.”
― Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land

“A cynic and an ideologist share a common pod of unrealized hopes, expectations, and beliefs. Just as an idealist metamorphoses into a crank right before turning into a full-fledged crackpot, I was bound to be disillusioned when the real world did not match my winged thoughts.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“We can be skeptical -- demanding evidence before we believe in people -- but hopeful knowing they can change for the better”
― Jamil Zaki

“Skeptics are always marked by their total lack of skepticism towards whatever position they are defending.”
― Steve Madison, Soul Science: Know Your Soul

“Cynicism is just a way of evading the truth a little longer.”
― Ian Kirkpatrick, Plead More, Bodymore

“A beautiful misanthropic.
Isolated & cryptic...
faith in society burned
by those who were acidic.
Empathetic
but a bit of a cynic
with a heart that yearns for something idyllic
and love that's authentic.”
― Evelyn Janeidy Arevalo

“Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours to civilize civilization and Christianize Christendom?”
― Herman Melville, White-Jacket or The World in a Man-of-War