Cyril Connolly quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Cyril Connolly on Wise Famous Quotes.

Most of the beauty of women evaporates when they achieve domestic happiness at the price of their independence.

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.

How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?

Art is made by the alone for the alone ... The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication ...

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.

Promise is the capacity for letting people down.

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.

Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.

When in doubt, choose greatness.

The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

Sheep with a nasty side.

We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.

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.

The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.

Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.

Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

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.

Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom.

There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.

There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.

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.

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers, so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.

In my religion, there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry, and doubt.

The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.

For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?

If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom.

Like many lazy people, once I started work I could not stop; perhaps that is why we avoid it.

The greatest problem with women is how to contrive that they should seem our equals

No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

We fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noises.

Is it possible to love any human being without being torn limb from limb?

We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.

An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.

Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.

Friendships that last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from them.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.

In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.

A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.

Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.

It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.

It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.

A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Everyone has the right to express an opinion. No one has the right to be listened to.

The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient; afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.

Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.

The books I haven't written are better than the books other people have.

Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.

Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.

Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.

Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.

All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.

Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

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

Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.

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.

It is a consolation of human life that the sick forget what it is like to feel well, or the miserable to be happy.

The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.

The headmistress was an able instructress in French and history and we learned with her as fast as fear could teach us.

He [George Orwell] would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.

There is no suicide for which all society is not responsible.

That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.

Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.

M is for Marx
And clashing of classes
And movement of masses
And massing of asses.

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?

Only by avoiding the beginning of things can we escape their end.

The dread of lonliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion.

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.

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.

A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent.

Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.

It is closing time in the gardens of the West.

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.

Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.

Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectified. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.

There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.

When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.

Nothing dates like hate and in literature a little of it goes a very long way.

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]

The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.

Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.

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