Cyril Connolly Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings 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.
Art is made by the alone for the alone ... The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication ...
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.
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.
Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
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.
There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.
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.
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.
If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom.
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
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.
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.
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.
A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.
It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.
In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient; afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.
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.
All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
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.
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.
Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.
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.
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.