Cynic

“ CYNICS AND EPICUREANS.—The cynic recognises the connection between the multiplied and stronger pains of the more highly cultivated man and the abundance of requirements ; he comprehends, therefore, that the multitude of opinions about what is beautiful, suitable, seemly and pleasing, must also produce very rich sources of enjoyment, but also of displeasure. ”

“ But remember that a cynic always conceals a soul desolated by the reality of things. I shall tell you that the time has been just what it had to be, and, in telling you this, how my heart overflows with an intense bitterness against love’s fall, against the misery of this sentiment and its fugacity. Otherwise I had hoped, lady mine, otherwise we had hoped together. We believed, too, and feared that unhappiness and sorrow would have come to us from outside, from those whom we had abandoned, from laws which we had violated, from society which we had offended. ”

“ You pose as a cynic, as a man who looks down upon the petty things that make up life for most of us, but I—I, who have lived with you, struggled with you, known so many of the trials and heart-breakings of everyday life with you—I know you better. ”

“ There is not a joyful boy or an innocent girl buoyant with [277] fine purposes of duty, in all the street full of eager and rosy faces, but a cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word. Despondency comes readily enough to the most sanguine. The cynic has only to follow their hint with his bitter confirmation, and they check that eager courageous pace and go home with heavier step and premature age. ”

“ I have heard it said by scholars, that cynical means doggish in Greek. The fable of the dog in the horse's manger was invented to define the real cynic—the man who neither enjoys life himself nor will allow other people to enjoy it. ”

“ Above all, be bold, be impudent; distribute your abuse impartially to king and commoner. They will admire your spirit. You will talk the Cynic jargon with the true Cynic snarl, scowling as you walk, and walking as one should who scowls; an epitome of brutality. Away with modesty, good-nature, and forbearance. Wipe the blush from your cheek for ever. Your hunting-ground will be the crowded city. You will live alone in its midst, holding communion with none, admitting neither friend nor guest ”

“ But no, you say, what makes a Cynic is a contemptible wallet, a staff, and big jaws; to devour everything you give him, or to stow it away, or to revile tactlessly the people he meets, or to show off his fine shoulder. ”

“ That some cynic had lately bitten him by the brain—and possibly a cynic himself in a nearly rabid stage of anthropophobia—we might conclude as reasonably from consideration of the whole as from examination of the parts more especially and virulently affected: yet how much is here also of hyper-Platonic subtlety and sublimity, of golden and Hyblæan eloquence above the reach and beyond the snap of any cynic's tooth! ”

“ From a religious point of view, both may be equally real and conducive to salvation. The cynic, the worn out man of the world, the man whose heart is broken, all look upon the one as a weakness and the other as a strength. ”

“ Now if from such works any man chooses to demonstrate to us the character of the Cynic philosophy, and to blaspheme the gods and bark at all men, as I said when I began, let him go, let him depart to the uttermost parts of the earth whithersoever he pleases. ”

“ But let me go back to what I said before, that he who is entering on the career of a Cynic ought first to censure severely and cross-examine himself, and without any self-flattery ask himself the following questions in precise terms: whether he enjoys expensive food; whether he cannot do without a soft bed; whether he is the slave of rewards and the opinion of men ”

“ Somehow the ducal brand of cynicism was edged like a razor, and the underlying contempt poisoned the wounds it dealt. The man who had sprung from the people, who in accordance with the brutal innuendo of the man of privilege would be only too ready to throw them over as soon as they had served his turn, was powerless before it. ”

“ It is the fashion of cynics to say that mankind will suffer and deny themselves for the sake of some definite concrete thing, like money or a jewel or a picture, but never for an idea. Here was an instance that blew such cynicism to atoms. ”

“ I wish, without seeking embarrassing confidences, to remind you that young people are apt to think bad matters—other than business matters—worse than they are. I am not asking questions, but, when I was younger, cynicism usually hid but ill the scars of heartache. ”

“ It abounds with cynicism so delicate and restrained as to be most unkindly telling. It gives brilliant little peeps at a world less respectable than its half-sister, the demi-monde, because so infinitely more cruel and less candid.”—Saturday Review. ”

“ We have lived our lives, felt, suffered, rejoiced, and perhaps grown a little tolerant, a little apathetic. The [Pg 27] young people call it cynical; yet it is not cynicism—only a large charity for the failings, the shortcomings of others. ”

“ But if a Cynic is an object of pity, he seems a mere beggar; all turn away, all are offended at him. Nor should he be slovenly of look, so as not to scare men from him in this way either; on the contrary, his very roughness should be clean and attractive. ”

“ He who cannot rest in a state of irony flies for refuge to the cynicism. The last decade makes him a present of one of its most beautiful inventions, a full and well-rounded phrase for this cynicism: he calls his way of living thoughtlessly and after the fashion of his time, “the full surrender of his personality to the world-process.” The personality and the world-process! The world-process and the personality of the earthworm! ”

“ A cynic is the alert and discerning man who declines to cut the cotton-filled pie or pick up the decoy purse on All Fools’ Day.
We are bound to test for ourselves the identical heating apparatus which the man next door cast away as rubbish last spring. ”

“ A nice girl meets your Cynic-Maker, finds that he forgets to whom, from which she concludes [39] that all men are a mockery. Then some honest young fellow meets her, revolts at her crude, newly fledged cynicism, which an older or a less honest man might have penetrated in a moment, decides that all women are depraved, and there you are with all the elements of a social tragedy. We may say that the arch-mischief-maker is the man who creates the cynic ”

“ The ideal of the Cynic life has been painted with gentle enthusiasm by Epictetus.1904 The true Cynic is a messenger from Zeus, to tell men that they have wandered far from the right way, that they are seeking happiness in regions where happiness is not to be found. ”

“ I may sound very cynical, but a cynic is really a realist. ”

“ Endure for the brief fraction of a day even a babbling Cynic! It is not the first time that thou hast had to hear the gods blasphemed! Our state is not so well governed, our private life is not so virtuous, [205] in a word we are not so favoured by fortune that we can keep our ears pure or at any rate our eyes at least undefiled by the many and various impieties of this iron race. ”

“ But perhaps you will say that though reason asserts that the Cynic, who alone of men can claim to be free, ought not to invent and compose lying fictions instead of the unvarnished truth and then recite these in public assemblies, nevertheless the custom began with Diogenes and Crates, and has been maintained from that time by all Cynics. ”

“ An acquired cynicism was eternally crushing and overlying his natural youthful enthusiasms, and he ignored what was obvious while expressing keen appreciation for what seemed to the average man to be either trivial or unhealthy. ”

“ If it is true that through our contacts we are sprinkled with a coating of the dry dust of cynicism, that dust was blown away in a breath, as it were, when our professional brethren who greeted you overseas broadcast the news of your peerless exploit. ”

“ The world does funny things with us. To be taken at your word like that; really to find people about you as bad as you have declared humanity at large to be; to stumble and break your knees over a justification of your cynicism—it would seem a thing that should meet with acquiescence, perhaps even with a sombre satisfaction. ”

“ There are certain sensitive and idealistic people in whom the discovery that the world is what it is brings on a sudden and violent reaction towards cynicism. From soaring in spheres of ideal purity they rush down into the mud, rub their noses in it, eat it, bathe and wallow. They lacerate their own highest feelings and delight in the pain. They take pleasure in defiling the things which before they thought beautiful and noble ”

“ What was "A Channel Passage" thus but a flourish marked with the sign of all his flourishes, that of being a success and having fruition? Though it performed the extraordinary feat of directing the contents of the poet's stomach straight at the object of his displeasure, we feel that, by some excellent grace, the object is not at all reached—too many things, and most of all, too innocently enormous a cynicism, standing in the way and themselves receiving the tribute; having in a word, impatient young cynicism as they are, that experience as well as various things. ”

“ No one who has not the faculty of analysis ever gets anywhere; no one who has that faculty ever escapes the charge of cynicism. Shallow people—the sort that make such a charge—will regard it as proof of my utter cynicism, my absolute lack of sentiment, that I was able to analyze the woman I loved, or pretended I loved. But I assure you, gentle reader, that not even love and passion suspend the habitual processes of a good mind. ”

“ I will give most respectable men a fortnight of such a life, and then I will offer them twopence for what remains of their morality.
I hate cynicism a great deal worse than I do the devil; unless, perhaps, the two were the same thing? And yet ‘tis a good tonic; the cold tub and bath-towel of the sentiments; and positively necessary to life in cases of advanced sensibility.
Most men, finding themselves the authors of their own disgrace, rail the louder against God or destiny. Most men, when they repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness of that repentance. ”

“ They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go. ”

“ I declare that the real secret of the cynicism and inhumanity of which shallower critics accuse me is the unexpectedness with which my characters behave like human beings, instead of conforming to the romantic logic of the stage. ”

“ His general cynicism, however, is combined with tenderness of heart; he grieves even at the physical pain endured by brutes; and the moral evil of the world, which he sees through and through, pains and distresses him. The selfishness which makes worldlings bequeath wealth to the rich, and which makes “misery part the flux of company,” and the prosperous to look with contempt upon the wretched, is to him not a source of hatred, but of sorrow. ”

“ Some of the great Cynics, indeed, were interested in physical speculation, and were widely cultivated men.1866 But the Cynic movement, as a whole, rested on no scientific tradition, and the most serious and effective preacher of its doctrine needed only a firm hold of a few simple truths, with a command of seizing and incisive phrase.1867 There was no professional barrier to exclude the ignorant and corrupt pretender. For the Cynics, from the very nature of their mission and their aims, never formed an organised school or society. ”

“ Yet are not philosophers merely soured cynics, after all? And I certainly was neither cynical nor soured. Therefore my philosophy was but a mere ridiculous affectation to which so many men and women are prone. ”

“ Let us, in the presence of such hideous machinery, cease to be literal in matters of sentiment, even at the price of a little sadness and cynicism in recognizing the unreality of everything save our own moods and fancies. ”

“ No, since I accept your ravage, what strikes me is the long list of the arrears of your undone; and so constantly, right and left, that your pretended message of civilization is but a colossal recipe for the creation of arrears, and of such as can but remain forever out of hand. You touch the great lonely land—as one feels it still to be—only to plant upon it some ugliness about which, never dreaming of the grace of apology or contrition, you then proceed to brag with a cynicism all your own. ”

“ The few men who have been able (relatively) to do this have been called cynics, and have sometimes had an abnormal share of evil in themselves, corresponding to the abnormal strength of their minds; but they have never done mischief unless they intended to do it. ”

“ I mean so- called cynics, those who simply recognize the animal, the commonplace and "the rule" in themselves, and at the same time have so much spirituality and ticklishness as to make them talk of themselves and their like BEFORE WITNESSES--sometimes they wallow, even in books, as on their own dung-hill. ”

“ It is the fashion for people now-a-days to affect this cynicism, and to expend their wit at the expense of poor human nature, which is abused en masse for the sins of those who abuse it from judging of all others by self. ”

“ The seeming obduracy of inanimate objects, when we try to disentangle their complications by means of anger, shows that emotional action may be quite absurd when applied to affairs of the intellect. A like suggestion of mania is observable in the cynicism which sees in human nature only different grades of rascality. ”

“ There are cynics who think it strange that men are willing to dress up in fantastic uniform and regalia and march about in sun and rain to make a holiday for their countrymen, but the cynics are ungrateful, and fail to credit human nature with its trait of self-sacrifice, and they do not at all comprehend our civilization. ”