Cyril Connolly Quotes - Page 2

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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

  Tasks, Literature, Produce

  Cyril Connolly, Peter Quennell (1984). “The selected essays of Cyril Connolly”

  8 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Happiness, Tyranny, Egotism

  8 Copy quote

• Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

  Cyril Connolly

  Sarcastic, Sarcasm, Intelligence

  Enemies of Promise ch. 13 (1938)

  7 Copy quote

• Flaubert spoke true: to succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price. Our writers have either no personality and therefore no style or a false personality and therefore a bad style; they mistake prejudice for energy and accept the sensation of material well-being as a system of thought.

  Cyril Connolly

  Country, Mistake, Character

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

  14 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

  14 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.

  32 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.

  67 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Ends, Avoiding

  7 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Writing, Style, Language

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.17, University of Chicago Press

  6 Copy quote

• Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.

  Cyril Connolly

  Believe, Judgement, Atheism

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Infidelity, Age, Causes

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Love, Marriage, Parent

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

  27 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

  37 Copy quote

• 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

  16 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.

  15 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Alive, Literature

  29 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Life, Fear, Publishing Books

  Enemies of Promise (1938) ch. 10

  25 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.

  9 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Class, Movement, Ass

  5 Copy quote

• Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

  Cyril Connolly

  Names, Literature, Infinite

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

  12 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

  15 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Science, Artist, Technology

  9 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Passion, Men, Slave

  7 Copy quote

• Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.

  Cyril Connolly

  Men, Literature, Fats

  "Cyril Connolly: journal and memoir".

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Running, Reality, Wind

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

  5 Copy quote

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