Cyril Connolly Quotes

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Opinion  

  2239

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Women   Wife   Lovers  

  1709

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Love  

  1040

• 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.

  Cyril Connolly

  Nature   Ideas   Gains  

  3842

• 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

  4569

• 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.

  224

• 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”

  2714

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Nature   Men   Literature  

  661

• 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.

  2296

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Art   Class   Leisure  

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

  3701

• 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".

  2324

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Civilization   Atheism   Literature  

  2114

• 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

  Swim   Wicked   Atheism  

  2024

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Cheating   Revenge   Women  

  4945

• Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.

  Cyril Connolly

  Dream   Selfish   Night  

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

  2994

• Promise is the capacity for letting people down.

  Cyril Connolly

  People   Promise   Capacity  

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.260, University of Chicago Press

  4924

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Class   Delirium Tremens   Apathy  

  4633

• In the dream of approaching forty I saw myself as about to die and realized that I was no longer myself, but a creature inhabited entirely by parasites, as a caterpillar is occupied by the grubs of the ichneumon fly. Gin, whisky, sloth, fear, guilt, tobacco, had made themselves my inquilines; alcohol sloshed about within, while tendrils of melon and vine grew out of ears and nostrils; my mind was a worn gramophone record, my true self was such a ruin as to seem non-existent, and all this had happened in the last three years.

  Cyril Connolly

  Dream   Years   Self  

  3141

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

  Cyril Connolly

  God   Atheism   Pessimistic  

  4998

• When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?

  Cyril Connolly

  Men   Years   Garbage Cans  

  4183

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Art   Blow   Noses  

  604

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Love   Greed   Comfort  

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

  3901

• 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.

  1180

• In America every woman has her set of girl-friends; some are cousins, the rest are gained at school. These form a permanent committee who sit on each other's affairs, who come out together, marry and divorce together, and who end as those groups of bustling, heartless well-informed club-women who govern society. Against them the Couple of Ehepaar is helpless and Man in their eyes but a biological interlude.

  Cyril Connolly

  Friendship   Girl   Cousin  

  3913

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Country   Nature   Book  

  1106

• 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  

  3280

• 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

  3890

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Sarcastic   Sarcasm   Intelligence  

  Enemies of Promise ch. 13 (1938)

  3568

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Believe   Judgement   Atheism  

  2484

• Two weeks before his death, a friend asked him half jokingly if he had discovered any meaning in life. "Yes," he replied, "there is a meaning; at least, for me, there is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people."

  Cyril Connolly

  Two   People   Mind  

  Cyril Connolly (1953). “Ideas and Places”, London, Weidenfeld

  3757

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