Top 100 Cyril Connolly Quotes

#1. Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #21615
#2. Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
[The New Statesman, February 25, 1933]

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #23485
#3. Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #29130
#4. For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #32992
#5. A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant and ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #36021
#6. All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #68990
#7. There is a way of leaving and yet of not leaving; of hinting that one loves and is willing to return, yet never coming back and so preserving a relationship in a lingering decay.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #86771
#8. We pay for vice by the knowledge that we are wicked; we pay for pleasure when we find out too late that we are nothing.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #88596
#9. Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #108028
#10. Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #119790
#11. English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid; one attractive, one vulgar; one noble, one ape-like; one serious and sincere, one undignified and false; one far-sighted, one short; EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #140392
#12. Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #155230
#13. Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #163664
#14. A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion, for the instinctual drives must be satisfied.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #167902
#15. Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #181129
#16. Art is made by the alone for the alone ... The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication ...

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #196540
#17. The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #207205
#18. While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
Cyril Connolly (English critic and editor, 1903-1974)

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #210226
#19. The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #226063
#20. Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #226738
#21. Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #250332
#22. Someone - Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? - once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable.

Joseph Epstein

Cyril Connolly Quotes #264107
#23. Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #266784
#24. M is for Marx
And clashing of classes
And movement of masses
And massing of asses.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #270620
#25. Like many lazy people, once I started work I could not stop; perhaps that is why we avoid it.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #270705
#26. Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #283067
#27. A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #287231
#28. Early laurels weigh like lead and of many of the boys whom I knew at Eton, I can say that their lives are over ... Once again romanticism with its death wish is to blame, for it lays an emphasis on childhood, on a fall from grace which is not compensated for by any doctrine of future redemption.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #287780
#29. Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #329814
#30. We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #332269
#31. Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #347382
#32. In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #359463
#33. There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #363407
#34. Promise is the capacity for letting people down.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #391212
#35. Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #396294
#36. When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #418449
#37. Popular success is a palace built for a writer by publishers, journalists, admirers, and professional reputation makers, in which a silent army of termites, rats, dry rot, and death-watch beetles are tunnelling away, till, at the very moment of completion, it is ready to fall down.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #418890
#38. In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient; afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #421594
#39. Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #426613
#40. Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #435854
#41. In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #446508
#42. The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #454045
#43. Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #455517
#44. It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #471874
#45. We fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noises.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #496759
#46. Approaching forty, I had a singular dream in which I almost grasped the meaning and understood the nature of what it is that wastes in wasted time.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #514737
#47. How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #515968
#48. Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #518056
#49. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #533433
#50. The artist secretes nostalgia around life.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #548340
#51. The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #554918
#52. There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #556328
#53. Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #557577
#54. The true work of art is the one which the seventh wave of genius throws up the beach where the undertow of time cannot drag it back.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #560960
#55. Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #569660
#56. The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #587027
#57. Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #597154
#58. No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, - something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #603671
#59. A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #612291
#60. Never will I make that extra effort to live according to reality which alone makes good writing possible: hence the manic-depressiveness of my style, - which is either bright, cruel and superficial; or pessimistic; moth-eaten with self-pity

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #619014
#61. Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #644598
#62. Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #651528
#63. Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #668838
#64. The dread of lonliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #691044
#65. Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #691149
#66. No education is worth having that does not teach the lesson of concentration on a task, however unattractive. These lessons, if not learnt early, will be learnt, if at all, with pain and grief in later life.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #703402
#67. Beneath this mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivilous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit ridden, I let it reform.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #737755
#68. An aesthetic movement with a revolutionary dynamism and no popular appeal should proceed quite otherwise than by public scandal, publicity stunt, noisy expulsion and excommunication.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #771118
#69. Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink them and we choose our direction.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #804385
#70. Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #813687
#71. Sheep with a nasty side.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #834585
#72. Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #839504
#73. The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #847180
#74. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectified. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #852237
#75. It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #857780
#76. We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #862348
#77. When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #880055
#78. As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers, so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #882634
#79. When every unkind word about women has been said, we have still to admit, with Byron, that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted, more unselfish and more emotionally sincere. When the long fuse of cruelty, deceit and revenge is set alight, it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #914964
#80. When in doubt, choose greatness.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #946964
#81. Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #956354
#82. Why do ants alone have parasites whose intoxicating moistures they drink and for whom they will sacrifice even their young? Because as they are the most highly socialized of insects, so their lives are the most intolerable.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #957869
#83. It is the fear of middle-age in the young, of old-age in the middle-aged, which is the prime cause of infidelity, that infallible rejuvenator.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #965712
#84. The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #967368
#85. No opinions, no ideas, no real knowledge of anything, no ideals, no inspiration; a fat, slothful, querulous, greedy, impotent carcass; a stump, a decaying belly washed up on the shore ... Always tired, always bored, always hurt, always hating.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #997325
#86. There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be traveling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #998624
#87. The Expulsion from Eden is an act of vindictive womanish spite; the Fall of Man, as recounted in the Bible, comes nearer to the Fall of God.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #998725
#88. The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #1007924
#89. Everyone has the right to express an opinion. No one has the right to be listened to.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #1012764
#90. Both my happiness and unhappiness I owe to the love of pleasure; of sex, travel, reading, conversation (hearing oneself talk), food, drink, cigars and lying in warm water.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #1013936
#91. Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the way of our happy union.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #1039140
#92. Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #1039504
#93. The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #1063361
#94. The greatest problem with women is how to contrive that they should seem our equals

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #1063969
#95. Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #1070635
#96. Only by avoiding the beginning of things can we escape their end.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #1097415
#97. Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #1116111
#98. The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #1142823
#99. Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #1148392
#100. The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes #1166747

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