A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

H. L. Mencken used this line in the course of defining and satirizing “the cynic,” a recurring target in his essays and journalistic sketches of American manners. The quip belongs to Mencken’s early-20th-century persona as a sharp-tongued cultural critic who delighted in puncturing sentimentality and exposing what he saw as hypocrisy or self-deception. Rather than describing a particular event, the remark functions as an aphoristic definition—typical of Mencken’s style—casting cynicism as a reflexive suspicion that even pleasant experiences (like the smell of flowers) must conceal something morbid or self-interested.

Mencken’s quip defines cynicism as a reflexive suspicion that pleasant appearances conceal something morbid or self-interested. The image is deliberately comic: instead of enjoying the scent of flowers, the cynic assumes they must be funeral flowers and immediately searches for the coffin. The line captures a psychological posture—expecting the worst, reading generosity as manipulation, and treating beauty as a prelude to decay. In Mencken’s broader satirical spirit, it also mocks the cynic’s need to be “too knowing,” suggesting that cynicism can be less a hard-won realism than a habitual, joyless interpretive bias.