Best Quotes by Cyril Connolly (Top 10)
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While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
Cyril Connolly
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Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
Cyril Connolly
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Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly
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As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Cyril Connolly
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There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
Cyril Connolly
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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
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The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.
Cyril Connolly
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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
Cyril Connolly
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Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
Cyril Connolly
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All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
Cyril Connolly
More Cyril Connolly Quotes
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Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
Cyril Connolly
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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
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No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
Cyril Connolly
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Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
Cyril Connolly
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Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.
Cyril Connolly
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Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
Cyril Connolly
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A great writer created a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
Cyril Connolly
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There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.
Cyril Connolly
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Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
Cyril Connolly
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Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
Cyril Connolly
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A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.
Cyril Connolly
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If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are - like fishes not meant to swim
Cyril Connolly
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In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.
Cyril Connolly
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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
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Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.
Cyril Connolly
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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
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Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.
Cyril Connolly
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We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.
Cyril Connolly
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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
Cyril Connolly
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A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion, for instinctual drives must be satisfied
Cyril Connolly
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The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
Cyril Connolly
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The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
Cyril Connolly
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Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.
Cyril Connolly
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Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
Cyril Connolly
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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
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Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.
Cyril Connolly
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The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
Cyril Connolly
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We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
Cyril Connolly
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Friendships that last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from them.
Cyril Connolly
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Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
Cyril Connolly
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Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.
Cyril Connolly
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The English masses are lovable: they are kind, decent, tolerant, practical and not stupid. The tragedy is that they are too many of them, and that they are aimless, having outgrown the servile functions for which they were encouraged to multiply. One day these huge crowds will have to seize power because there will be nothing else for them to do, and yet they neither demand power nor are ready to make use of it; they will learn only to be bored in a new way.
Cyril Connolly
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The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.
Cyril Connolly