Trustful people are the pure at heart, as they are moved by the zeal of their own trustworthiness.

The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

The only activity a cynic will find contagious is yawning, that is, with other people, at other people.

This boy," he said, indicating the paintings with one sweep of his arms, "was romantic. He thought that it was beauty that bound everything together. And for him it was true. Life had been beautiful for him. He was very young. He knew very little of life. He saw beauty but he did not feel any true passion. How could he? He did not know. He had not really encountered the force of beauty's opposite.""Are you more cynical now, then?" she asked him."Cynical," he frowned, "No, not that. I know that there is an ugly side of life-and not just human life. I know that everything is not simply beautiful. I am not a romantic as this boy was. But I am not a cynic either. There is something enduring in all of life, Anne, something tough. Something. Something terribly weak yet incredibly powerful...

It's weird, marriage. It's like this license that gives a person the legal right to control their spouse / their 'other half.

You are a cynical man, Mr. Pleasant.""We live in cynical times, Miss Cain.

We are all cynics now, I suppose, and even a mewling infant knows that to save a life is to make an eternal enemy.

Where neither go wrong, the naive only see the world as a victim of bad doctrine; the cynic only sees good doctrine as a victim of the world.

It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.

Only a cynic can create horror--for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

I am metaphysical being, mystical and emotional, skeptical and cynical, happy and boisterous, loud and bawdy, quiet and melancholy, tender and cruel, full of mirth and despair. Inherent inconsistences mark me as part of nature, which is neither cruel nor fair, or reliable or predictable.

The first rule in life is 'everybody lies.' Remember that and you'll get a lot further.

Mitch's take on humanity had deteriorated to the point where he assumed someone was lying if her lips were moving.

Scratch a cynic and you will find a disappointed romantic.

Having in our childhood felt primal awe for the spectacle of the holiday, we are told to age into feeling sullen and resentful. You are supposed to proclaim Santa dead like preadolescent Nietzsches and decry the whole month as an orgy of crass commercialism.

She is so free with herself and so certain of her path, something I now cynically believe only comes from not being aware of the infinite multitude of right paths.

Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers,things standing shall fall,but the moving ever shall stay.

A cynic by experience, a romantic by inclination and now a hero by necessity.

I can't bear the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom.

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. The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion.