Quotes Tagged "cynicism"

Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying “yes” begins things. Saying “yes” is how things grow. Saying “yes” leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say “yes'.

Life seemed to him to be a narrow cage, and her iron bars were many and dense, and there was only one way out.

I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life--that life that must go on, come what may. You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness--provided a person doesn't ask much of life. I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate. I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me if I promise to be a good little girl. I want to be sure of everything this very day; sure that everything will be as beautiful as when I was a little girl. If not, I want to die!

Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be returned: how much more simple life would be. One could plod through the Siberian salt mines of existence without being bothered about happiness.

…a cynic who was still saddened whenever his jaundiced view of mankind was confirmed...

For as long as the Minotaur can remember - no, for much longer than he can remember - he has risen every day aware of the possibility of change. Some would call him gullible. The truth is, there are days on end when he would gladly barter some of his hope for the arrogant cynicism of people like Shane and Mike. In the backseat the Minotaur's wristwatch pounds incessantly at the thin bones of his arm, resonates up through the joints, rides roughshod over his ribs and battles with the rhythms of his heart.

Trade in our cynical hopelessness for cynical hopefulness. If we must be cynical, choose hopeful over hopeless.

My pessimism and cynicism knows no bounds, nothing truly surprises me these days. But when that little spark of optimism, of hope is alight, it burns really brightly in the darkness.

Too much faith is the worst ally. When you believe in something literally, through your faith you'll turn it into something absurd. One who is a genuine adherent, if you like, of some political outlook, never takes its sophistries seriously, but only its practical aims, which are concealed beneath these sophistries. Political rhetoric and sophistries do not exist, after all, in order that they be believed; rather, they have to serve as a common and agreed upon alibi. Foolish people who take them in earnest sooner or later discover inconsistencies in them, begin to protest, and finish finally and infamously as heretics and apostates. No, too much faith never brings anything good...

It seems all spirits need theatrics, eh? Even Christ himself requires incense and holy water. We're a skeptical people. We need convincing.

Don't give up your greatness because of someone's cynicism or narrowness of mind.

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.

He was not even a Catholic, yet that was the only ghost of a code that he had, the gaudy, ritualistic, paradoxical Catholicism whose prophet was Chesterton, whose claqueurs were such reformed rakes of literature as Huysmans and Bourget, whose American sponsor was Ralph Adams Cram, with his adulation of thirteenth-century cathedrals--a Catholicism which Amory found convenient and ready-made, without priest or sacraments or sacrifice.

In Paris, where raillery is so quick to throw emotion out the window, silence, in a roomful of clever people after a story, is the most flattering of all marks of success

Cynicism breeds hate, whereas inquiry breeds understanding.

Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.

Sometimes I think books are the only friends worth having.

...Who knows what is and is not proof to the crotchety ladies and chainstore owners who sit and die on Boards of Education?

History provides an antidote to cynicism about the past.

Reject cynicism. Reject certitude. And don't be a jerk. Be a good guy.