Good Quotations for Curmudgeons

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.  

G.K. Chesterton

I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities.  It is the only pleasure I have left. 

Voltaire

The only thing that could spoil a day was people.  People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.  

Ernest Hemingway

All our lives we are putting pennies - our most golden pennies - into penny-in-the-slot machines that are almost always empty.  

Logan Pearsall Smith

Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.  

Horace Walpole

Oftentimes, when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too.  But it never helps.  

Lemony Snicket

Paradoxical as it sounds, many intellectuals prefer life in the mud to life in clear water.  

Martin H. Fischer

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. 

Maya Angelou

The mad are happy, the sane ignorant; those of us stuck on the sane side of madness or the mad fringe of sanity are in a purgatorial cage.  

Anonymous

Fate stalks us with depressing monotony from womb to tomb, and, when we are least expecting it, deals us a series of crushing blows from behind. 

Hesketh Pearson

My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists.  

Jean Rostand

Nothing begins, and nothing ends, that is not paid with moan; for we are born in other's pain, and perish in our own.  

Francis Thompson

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.  

Kenneth Clark

Of the demonstrably wise there are but two:  those who commit suicide, and those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied by drink.  

Mark Twain

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. 

 George Bernard Shaw

I don't answer the phone.  I get the feeling whenever I do that there will be someone on the other end.  

Fred Couples

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral?  Is it because we are not the person involved? 

Mark Twain

He had the uneasy manner of a man who is not among his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the world to feel that all people are in some sense his own kind. 

Willa Cather

Many of us go through life feeling as an actor might feel who does not like his part, and does not believe in the play. 

Mignon McLaughlin