Cynicism Philosophy Quotes & Sayings

Some people's glasses are half full. I'm the one drinking them.
Some people have forgotten that Pluto is still a planet. I still remember my childhood.
Some people are vegans. I have common sense.
Some people call me Maurice. Some people call me the Gangsta of Love.
Some people just want to live ... but me, I'm the one still alive. — Dave Matthes

The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.
Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill. — Sinclair Lewis

The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance — Anna Funder

It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours. — Diogenes Of Sinope

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little. — Diogenes Of Sinope

Tolerating organized crime promotes the cheap philosophy that everything is a racket. It promotes cynicism among adults. It contributes to the confusion of the young and to the increase of juvenile delinquency. — Robert Kennedy

To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this:
1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.
2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
3. Charity is immoral.
4. Pay for your own fucking schools. — Matt Taibbi

Evil is boring. Cynicism is pointless. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Hopelessness is self-indulgent. On the other hand: Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright. Chronic ecstasy is a learnable skill. — Rob Brezsny

He had a look of composed dissatisfaction, as if he understood life thoroughly. — Flannery O'Connor

On the brink of sleep I have a gloomy thought: that saving yourself is only pushing yourself even deeper into the trap rather than getting out. Dying is the only way out. — Erri De Luca

Ignore cynicism, appreciate criticism, and embrace optimism. — Debasish Mridha

Poverty is a virtue which one can teach oneself. — Diogenes Of Sinope

"Cynicism," like "heresy" and "heterodoxy" and "atheism" and "agnosticism" and "paganism" and "heathenism," is above all else a way for organized orthodoxy's caste of official censors to encyst and segregate and thus neutralize all contrarian forms of seeing and thinking, all (necessarily implicitly) prohibited and repressed ways of exercising disruptive and iconoclastic intuition and intellection (for to analyze and explain these things too openly is to give them publicity and potential cogency when the point is to asphyxiate them). — Kenny Smith

Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this 'living down', which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindness. — Roger Scruton

In theory man is put at the center of everything but in practice he is barely allowed to sit on the sidelines — Bangambiki Habyarimana

The truth is that there are two men in Ibsen - an idealist, exalted to the verge of sentimentality, and a critic, hard, inexorable, remorseless, to the verge of cynicism. What we call his "social philosophy" is a modus vivendi arrived at between them. Both agree in repudiating "marriage for love"; — Henrik Ibsen

Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust. — Kingsley Amis

The Cynics emphasized that true happiness is not found in external advantages such as material luxury, political power, or good health. True happiness lies in not being dependent on such random and fleeting things. And because happiness does not consist in benefits of this kind, it is within everyone's reach. moreover, having once been attained, it can never be lost. — Jostein Gaarder

Didn't Chains tell you about the Golden Theological Principle?"
"The what?"
"The single congruent aspect of every known religion. The one shared, universal assumption about the human condition."
"What is it?"
"He said that life boils down to standing in line to get shit dropped on your head. Everyone's got a place in the queue, you can't get out of it, and just when you start to congratulate yourself on surviving your dose of shit, you discover that line is actually circular. — Scott Lynch

I'm not into this whole "move with the times" thing. I reckon we should just decide on a year and stick with it. — R.D. Ronald

Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse — Joseph Brodsky