Cyril Connolly Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

  Cyril Connolly

  Civilization, Luxury, Goal

  15 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Sadness, Reality, Wind

  "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

  5 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Believe, People, Given

  6 Copy quote

• No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.

  Cyril Connolly

  Mind, Quality, Literature

  David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1983). “Cyril Connolly: journal and memoir”, HarperCollins

  4 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Alive, Literature

  28 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Morning, Men, Fog

  "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

  66 Copy quote

• 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 encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

  Cyril Connolly

  Country, Nice, Lying

  "The Unquiet Grave" by Cyril Connolly, (Part 2), 1951.

  31 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Love, Dream, Lonely

  "Phil Spector: What I've Learned", www.esquire.com. January 29, 2007.

  11 Copy quote

• Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.

  Cyril Connolly

  Inspirational, Nice, Writing

  David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1984). “Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir”

  9 Copy quote

• A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs, and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; - such is our personality.

  Cyril Connolly

  Weed, Lying, Flower

  "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Stupid, Intelligent, Law

  David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1983). “Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir”, HarperCollins

  8 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Work, Book, Writing

  11 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Class, Delirium Tremens, Apathy

  13 Copy quote

• In the sex-war, thoughtlessness is a weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female. Both are reciprocally generated, but a woman's desire for revenge outlasts all other emotion. Yet 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

  Sex, Revenge, War

  14 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Funny, Death, Suicide

  The Unquiet Grave Pt II

  36 Copy quote

• Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.

  Cyril Connolly

  Education, Disappointment, School

  Cyril Connolly (1960). “Enemies of promise and other essays: an autobiography of ideas”

  8 Copy quote

• There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity, our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may be able to cease from hating... Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.

  Cyril Connolly

  Dream, Children, Hate

  "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

  14 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Happiness, Tyranny, Egotism

  6 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Food, Loss, Purpose

  The Unquiet Grave Pt I

  12 Copy quote

• Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.

  Cyril Connolly

  Christian, Atheism, Poison

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Appreciation, Hands, People

  Cyril Connolly (1960). “Enemies of promise and other essays: an autobiography of ideas”

  7 Copy quote

• The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.

  Cyril Connolly

  Life, Beautiful, Art

  "The Unquiet Grave" by Cyril Connolly, (Part 2), 1951.

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Party, Book, Writing

  4 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Suicide, Responsible

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Stress, Environmental, Entering

  24 Copy quote

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