Cynic Quotes

An idealist believes the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run. (Sydney J. Harris)
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Woman: the peg on which the wit hangs his jest, the preacher his text, the cynic his grouch and the sinner his justification. View quote
Helen Rowland
A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future. View quote
Sydney J. Harris
There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. View quote
Maya Angelou
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. View quote
Eric Hoffer
It is good to be a cynic - it is better to be a contented cat - and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world - we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death - the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed. View quote
H. P. Lovecraft
Remember, beneath every cynic there lies a romantic, and probably an injured one. View quote
Glenn Beck
Never be a cynic, even a gentle one. Never help out a sneer, even at the devil. View quote
Vachel Lindsay
One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror-for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them. View quote
H. P. Lovecraft
Loss either teaches you to persist in the face of suffering, or hardens you into a bitter cynic. Sometimes, it does a little of both. (Grace Slick)
Thrasyllus the Cynic begged a drachm of Antigonus. "That," said he, "is too little for a king to give." "Why, then," said the other, "give me a talent." "And that," said he, "is too much for a Cynic (or, for a dog) to receive." View quote
Plutarch
Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic. View quote
Colum McCann
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. View quote
Colum McCann
Being an old cynic myself I have strong notions about the true value of human gratitude. It is a currency whose worth plunges by the hour. View quote
Glen Cook
You're a cynic," Urgit accused. Silk shook his head. "No, Your Majesty. I'm a realist. View quote
David Eddings
A cynic is a man who looks at the world with a monocle in his mind's eye. View quote
Carolyn Wells
It takes a clever man to turn cynic and a wise man to be clever enough not to. View quote
Fannie Hurst
You're such a cynic," Molly said. "I think cynics are playful and cute. View quote
Jim Butcher
Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist. View quote
George Carlin
Diogenes, in his mud-covered sandals, tramps over the carpets of Aristippus. The cynic pullulated at every corner, and in the highest places. This cynic did nothing but saboter the civilisation of the time. He was the nihilist of Hellenism. He created nothing, he made nothing. His role was to undo - or rather to attempt to undo, for he did not succeed in his purpose. The cynic, a parasite of civilisation, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail. What would become of the cynic among a savage people where everyone, naturally and quite seriously, fulfils what the cynic farcically considers to be his personal role? (José Ortega y Gasset)
The cynic puts all human actions into two classes - openly bad and secretly bad. View quote
Henry Ward Beecher
Idealist: a cynic in the making. View quote
Irving Layton
I'm very used to playing the tomboy or the sarcastic cynic. That's my go-to. Playing the vulnerable of a real girl that's in real womanlike situations, where it's romanticized, I'm a little nervous about it. View quote
Kristen Bell
If a Cynic is an object of pity, he seems a mere beggar; all turn away, all are offended at him. Nor should be 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. View quote
Epictetus