Cynicism

“ Is it our cynicism, is it the premature exhaustion of intellect and imagination in a society that is sinking into decay, in spite of its youth? Is it that our moral principles are shattered to their foundations, or is it, perhaps, a complete lack of such principles among us? I cannot answer such questions; nevertheless they are disturbing, and every citizen not only must, but ought to be harassed by them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The first half of the doctrine alone would leave us in crude fantastic Cynicism,—the doctrine out of which the broader and deeper Stoic teaching took its rise. The Cynic paints the world in the flaring colours of his undisciplined, individual caprice. Modern apostles of the essential Stoic principle incline to paint the world in the roseate hues of a merely optional optimism. They want to be well, and happy, and serene, and self-satisfied; they think they are; and thinking makes them so. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is no prouder or at the same time more subtle kind of books: they sometimes attain to the highest pinnacle of earthly endeavour, cynicism; to capture their thoughts a man must have the tenderest fingers as well as the most intrepid fists. ”

“ And since it is a fact that Cynicism is a branch of philosophy, and by no means the most insignificant or least honourable, but rivalling the noblest, I must first say a few words about philosophy itself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then the thing becomes no more than a rotten shell; men obey their impulses but still wear their vows; cynicism and a lewd hypocrisy are born; the great realities are glozed over. Then comes the day when a more youthful and noble generation wakes to the horror of such a superstition. ”

“ 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 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. Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach what is called honesty; and the higher man must open his ears to all the coarser or finer cynicism, and congratulate himself when the clown becomes shameless right before him, or the scientific satyr speaks out. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Reason may be the lever, but sentiment gives you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the world. Even “sentimentality,” which is sentiment overdone, is better than that affectation of superiority to human weakness which is only tolerable as one of the stage properties of full-blown dandyism, and is, at best, but half-blown cynicism; which participle and noun you can translate, if you happen to remember the derivation of the last of them, by a single familiar word. ”

“ Whitford say that cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb's feathers; ”

“ It is hypocrisy to pretend that they are alone or even chiefly operative. But it is cynicism wholly to deny their influence. And of the two sins cynicism is the worse, because by over-emphasising it strengthens and cultivates the lower among the mixed motives by which men are ruled. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It does not touch the ‘catharsis’ of tragedy, which is another matter. For the rest, Congreve’s attitude, cynicism apart, is an attitude of irony and superiority over common emotions, the attitude, artificial and inoffensive, of the society he depicts in his greatest play. ”

“ His friends claimed for him a sensitive, reserved nature that shed humankind with reluctant cynicism for lack of a better method, a cynicism sharpened and brought to a point through years of close association with the evils and corruption, hypocrisy and injustice of the courts. ”

“ They would probably make it successful, thanks to the unhealthy curiosity by which even the freshest readers are tainted nowadays, for we live in a strange age, when cynicism reigns alike in letters, art, business, and politics. Cynicism is indeed the only sovereign that our pseudo-republic is willing to accept. ”

“ Recognizing, therefore, that in this cultivated age a wall of scepticism and cynicism is gradually being built up by intellectual thinkers of every nation against all that treats of the Supernatural and Unseen, I am aware that my narration of the events I have recently experienced will be read with incredulity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ There is hardly an example of what we should have thought would be common in their later lives, namely, a reaction from so much ideal effort, and a plunge into cynicism and malice, scoundrelism and the flesh-pots. ”

“ Then in a lower tone, and with a kindle of that cynicism to come upon folk who, working no evil and doing no wrong, are yet made to find themselves fronted of adverse tides and blown against by winds of cruelty, “Innocent, yes ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How weak and intolerably foolish to imagine evil where perhaps none was! Why should his thoughts fly to terrible reasons for the postponement of his joy, when in truth they could as well be of the simplest? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Or to be told,—Sin is no more clever, politic, or successful here, than hereafter. The wrong-doing which looks to you so prudent is folly. You, man of the world as you may think yourself, are simply, as often as you do wrong, blind, ignorant, suicidal. You are your own curse; your acts are their own curse. The injury to your own character and spirit, the injury to your fellow-creatures, which will again re-act on you,—these are the curses of God, which you will feel some day too heavy to be borne. ”

“ With the devils of human nature—the vanities, the greeds, the follies and needless resentments, the fear of self-knowledge, dread of the unfamiliar, the power lust of the morally blind, the passion for easy solutions, scapegoats, panaceas—how do you see such a world...? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The cynic expatiates on painful things—the blot on life's beauty, the shadow on its glory, the pitiful ending of its brave shows—only to gibe and mock. The realist lingers in the dissecting chamber for very delight in revolting themes. The pessimist enlarges on the power of melancholy that lie may justify despair. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ah, how many a poor foolish creature, in misery and shame, with a guilty conscience and a sad heart, sits down, like the prodigal son, among the swinish bad company into which his sins have brought him, longing to fill his belly with the husks which the swine eat! but he cannot. He tries to forget his sorrow by drinking, by bad company, by gambling, by gossiping, like the fools around him: but he cannot. He finds no more pleasure in sin. ”