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...

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

Scratch a cynic and you will find a disappointed romantic.

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 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.

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.

Remember, beneath every cynic there lies a romantic, and probably an injured one.

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.

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