Misanthrope Quotes & Sayings

Sincerity is the defence of every misanthrope. — David Joseph Cribbin

If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think. — Paul Theroux

I am a jack-of-all-trades. I edit and teach and at times desire to be a clothing designer or an artist (one who doesn't draw or paint or sew) and I write everything but poetry and I am a mother and a social maniac and a misanthrope and a burgeoning self-help guru and a girl who wants to look pretty and a girl who wants to look sexy and a girl who wants to look girly and a woman in her middle forties who wishes not to look like anything at all, who wishes sometimes to vanish. — Heidi Julavits

I alternate between feeling sympathetic toward humanity and being a misanthrope. When I'm sympathetic, it usually means I haven't been around people in awhile. — John Raptor

I found, increasingly, that I did not particularly care and I tried to fake a little kindness, a little sweetness, tried to mirror Luna back at herself, but that exhausted me after a week and I concluded that I was not meant for this sort of thing, friends, friendliness, no, I wasn't meant for it. — Catherine Lacey

The word introvert is not a synonym for hermit or misanthrope. — Susan Cain

Jesus to Pilate:
"The trouble is," the bound man went on, not stopping by anyone, "that you are too closed off and have definitely lost faith in people. You must agree, one can't place all one's affection in a dog. Your life is impoverished, Hegemon. — Mikhail Bulgakov

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness ... I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory ... Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping — Emil Cioran

I was an incredibly misanthrope. I couldn't relate to people my age, and I'm not sure why, as I wasn't particularly smart or interesting — Laura Marling

I wasn't a misanthrope and I wasn't a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself. — Charles Bukowski

I don't want to talk about those things. I see the worst in people. I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I've built my hatreds up over the years, little by little, Henry ... to have you here gives me a second breath. I can't keep doing this on my own with these ... people.
[laughs] — Paul Thomas Anderson

A few things introverts are not: The word introvert is not a synonym for hermit or misanthrope. Introverts can be these things, but most are perfectly friendly. — Susan Cain

If you're only sceptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything. You become a crochety misanthrope convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) Since major discoveries in the borderlines of science are rare, experience will tend to confirm your grumpiness. But every now and then a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you're too resolutely and uncompromisingly sceptical, you're going to miss (or resent) the transforming discoveries in science, and either way you will be obstructing understanding and progress. Mere scepticism is not enough. — Carl Sagan

Whenever I tell people I'm a misanthrope they react as though that's a bad thing, the idiots. I live in London, for God's sake. Have you walked down Oxford Street recently? Misanthropy's the only thing that gets you through it. It's not a personality flaw, it's a skill.
It's nothing to do with sheer numbers. Move me to a remote cottage in the Hebrides and I'd learn to despise the postman, even if he only visited once a year. I can't abide other people, with their stink and their noise and their irritating ringtones. Bill Hicks called the human race 'a virus with shoes', and if you ask me he was being unduly hard on viruses; I'd consider a career in serial killing if the pay wasn't so bad. — Charlie Brooker

I could never find two people who are perfectly equal: one will always be more valuable than the other. And many people, as a matter of fact, simply have no value. — Pentti Linkola

A savage review is much more entertaining for the reader than an admiring one; the little misanthrope in each of us relishes the rubbishing of someone else. — Arthur Smith

My aversion to over-packing and its uptight cousin, over-planning, stems from the belief that neither tendency is a fake problem. These are not amusing tics. They are not superfluous reflections on the personality of the packer, but profound ones. They suggest a dubiousness of other lifestyles (racist), a conviction that the world won't have what you need (princess), and a lack of faith that you'll continue being human when it doesn't (misanthrope). Plus, you'll probably have to check your bags. And how hard is it, really? It's just the one planet. I think by now we can all agree that the foundation of world travel goes something like bring a cardigan. — Sloane Crosley

Change is when new selves come into the foreground while others recede into forgotten landscapes. Maybe definition of having lived a full life is when every citizen in the hall of selves gets to take you for a spin, the commander the lover the coward the misanthrope the fighter the priest the moral guardian the immoral guardian the lover of life the hater of life the fool the judge the jury the executioner.. — Steve Toltz

Love rather than fear ... this radical philosophy is coming from me, an avowed misanthrope ... surely there is hope for us all. — Bill Hicks

Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope. — Irving Layton

The wolf had been trained by the man, or had trained himself unassisted, to divers wolfish arts, which swelled the receipts. "Above all things, do not degenerate into a man," his friend would say to him. Never did the wolf bite: the man did now and then. At least, to bite was the intent of Ursus. He was a misanthrope, and to italicize his misanthropy he had made himself a juggler. To live, also; for the stomach has to be consulted. — Victor Hugo

On those nights, the words were for me alone. They came up unbidden from my heart. They spilled over my tongue and spilled out my mouth. And because of them, I, who was nothing and nobody, was a prince of Denmark, a maid of Verona, a queen of Egypt. I was a sour misanthrope, a beetling hypocrite, a conjurer's daughter, a mad and murderous king. — Jennifer Donnelly

The great dilemma of human life is that we are all strangers in a strange land. Genetically we are disposed to be communitarian. Even the worst misanthrope needs human company, hungers for it. And no matter how individualistic we are, no matter how self-motivated, other people have strange and terrible powers over us. They can fill us with joy just by saying completely stupid things like "Good job" or "You were so cool." We are so hungry for the approval of the community that a pat on the back from someone we despise still makes us feel good. Even if we're ashamed of feeling good, we feel it. It — Orson Scott Card

My father was a misanthrope who slept all day and stayed up all night so that he wouldn't have to see people. He ran a business with a large staff but would go there at night and leave things for them to do during the day when he wasn't there. — Edmund White

Euripides questioned everything. He was a misanthrope who preferred books to men. — Edith Hamilton

I don't think that genius goes hand in hand with being socially inept or being a sociopath or being a misanthrope, but I do think that it is a mind that can think so differently - so beyond how one is supposed to think. — Hanya Yanagihara

He who has little communication with people is seldom a misanthrope. True misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world. This is because it is practical experience of life, and certainly not philosophy, that makes people hate their fellows. — Giacomo Leopardi

I have stopped being a misanthrope. — Irving Layton

I believe that human brilliance manifests itself only in flashes, among rare individuals. For this reason, humanity as a whole is enormously destructive: the creation of something as devastating as Western culture, which is now allowed to spread throughout the world, offers sufficient proof of this fact. — Pentti Linkola

Some book reviewer whose name I forget recently called me a 'vicious misanthrope' ... or maybe it was a 'cynical misanthrope' ... but either way, he (or she) was right; and what got me this way was politics. — Hunter S. Thompson

Of all people, you, a bona fide misanthrope, have become the prophet of light and love for the masses. You manage to reach so many people, and still you're lonelier than you have ever been. You embrace the universe, and then go to sleep on your lonesome inside your four walls. You dope your audience on kitsch and nonsense about humility, and all the while you actually idolize yourself. — Y.G. Levimor

Whoever is not a misanthrope at forty can never have loved mankind. — Nicolas Chamfort

I'm not anti-social. I'm just not social. — Woody Allen

Smartass ice heathens from the north descended upon small-town America to laugh at the superstitious but numerically superior yokels of the heartland. In a breathtakingly accurate preview of things to come, the yokels actually won the trial, but history judged them the losers - thanks mainly to the flamboyant propaganda of a godless misanthrope named H. L. Mencken, the brilliant Darwinian ancestor of the modern liberal media. — Matt Taibbi

misanthrope." Einstein — Walter Isaacson

I don't have many friends. It's not because I'm a misanthrope. It's because I'm reserved. I'm self-contained. I get all my adventures in my head when I'm writing my books. — Ian Rankin

There were nights when I got nothing, [but] I still played. With no one to hear me and no one to pay me, and it did not matter.
On those nights, the words were for me alone. They came up unbidden from my heart. They slipped over my tongue and spilled from my mouth. And because of them I, who was nothing and nobody, was a prince of Denmark, a maid of Verona, a queen of Egypt. I was a sour misanthrope, a beetling hypocrite, a conjurer's daughter, a mad and murderous king.
It was dark and it was cold on those nights. The world was harsh and I was hungry. Yet I had such joy from the words. Such joy.
There were times when I lifted my face to the sky, stretched my arms wide to the winter night, and laughed out loud, so happy was I.
The memory of it makes me laugh now, but not from happiness.
Be careful what you show the world.
You never know when the wolf is watching. — Jennifer Donnelly

Pragmatically speaking, I like the fact that the masses vote, abuse drugs, believe in Jesus, follow sports, and worship a flag. They are tools of social engineering that keep the many-too-many sedate, pacified, and out of many people's hair (chiefly, my own). — Matt Paradise

Why do they call me misanthrope? Because They hate me, not I them. — George Gordon Byron

Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud
and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The chief cause for the impending collapse of the world - the cause sufficient in and by itself - is the enormous growth of the human population: the human flood. The worst enemy of life is too much life: the excess of human life. — Pentti Linkola

Let the misanthrope shun men and abjure; the most are rather lovable than hateful. — Martin Farquhar Tupper

You call me a misanthrope because I avoid society. You err; I love society. Yet in order not to hate people, I must avoid their company. — Caspar David Friedrich

Samuel: What's a misanthrope?
Two Bob: A misanthrope is a bugger who hates every other bugger.
Samuel: Are we misanthropes?
Arthur: Lord no! We're family. — Nick Cave

All the hate and scorn and love of a deep nature, such as the shy man is ever cursed by, fester and corrupt within, instead of spending themselves abroad, and sour him into a misanthrope and cynic. — Jerome K. Jerome

A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope. — Dean Koontz

The myth of writer as, like, Asperger-style misanthrope, or, like, the Jack Nicholson, 'As Good As It Gets' - it just doesn't work, because writers, in order to write good characters, need to understand people. You need to understand your audience. You need to have so much empathy you could almost encourage empathy in others. — Patrick Rothfuss

From a misanthrope Bacchus makes me sociable ... Yet on the other hand I had already bowed and smiled; I had performed at least the motions of complaisancy; and how often have I not observed that the imitation begets the reality. — Patrick O'Brian

I am a misanthrope yet utterly benevolent. — Alfred Nobel

I'm still a recluse. I still hate everyone. I'm still a misanthrope. — Al Jourgensen

I am a misanthrope, but exceedingly benevolent; I am very cranky, and am a super-idealist ... I can digest philosophy better than food. — Alfred Nobel

If we define a misanthrope as 'someone who does not suffer fools and likes to see fools suffer,' we have described a person with something to look forward to. — Florence King

It is the misanthrope who alone has clarity.By standing outside the huddles of man,he sees a lot,and what he often sees is the evidence that people are not as smart as dogs think they are.And he wants to see it time and again.In the fog of ambiguities and mysteries,he desperately searches for truths because truth usually shows humanity in a poor light — Manu Joseph

I fall in love with everything I also hate everything. It's very hard to be a misanthrope and a romantic. — Marilyn Manson

I'm not a misogynist. I'm a misanthrope. I hate everyone equally. — David Sedaris

[Patricia Highsmith] was a figure of contradictions: a lesbian who didn't particularly like women; a writer of the most insightful psychological novels who, at times, appeared bored by people; a misanthrope with a gentle, sweet nature. — Andrew Wilson

My brother asked me once, 'Are you a misanthrope?' And I said, 'No, I just find people irritating.' — Craig Kilborn

The misanthrope, as an essentially solitary man, is not a man at all: he must be a beast or a god ... — Aristotle.

Fossey, Fossey, you cranky difficult strong-arming self-destructive misanthrope, mediocre scientist, deceiver of earnest college students, probable cause of more deaths of the gorillas than if you had never set foot in Rwanda, Fossey, you pain-in-the-ass saint, I do not believe in prayers or souls, but I will pray for your soul, I will remember you for all of my days, in gratitude for that moment by the graves when all I felt was the pure, cleansing sadness of returning home and finding nothing but ghosts. — Robert M. Sapolsky

A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope; a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed. — Herman Melville

My hate is general, I detest all men;
Some because they are wicked and do evil,
Others because they tolerate the wicked,
Refusing them the active vigorous scorn
Which vice should stimulate in virtuous minds. — Moliere

A misanthrope I can understand - a womanthrope, never! — Oscar Wilde

If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope. — Florence King

A man may make a misanthrope of himself, but he is never one by nature. — Lucy Larcom

I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and it was an ill match. She encouraged me to be a writer. She opened her home to black friends, and this was the 1950s. She didn't care later when I write about her. — Edmund White

People tell me I'm a misanthrope just because I hate all mankind. — Carl-John X. Veraja

I'm a realist." "You're a misanthrope. — Jason Mott

I am a misanthrope and yet utterly benevolent, have more than one screw loose yet am a super-idealist who digests philosophy more efficiently than food. — Alfred Nobel

What is an atheist, but one who does not, or will not, see in the universe a ruling principle of love; and what a misanthrope, but one who does not, or will not, see in man a ruling principle of kindness? — Herman Melville