Cyril Connolly Quotes

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Cyril Connolly

Profession : Journalist

Birth : September 10, 1903

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.

Cyril Connolly

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

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

Cyril Connolly

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

The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

Cyril Connolly

All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.

Cyril Connolly

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.

Cyril Connolly

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

Cyril Connolly

Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.

Cyril Connolly

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

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

Cyril Connolly

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

Cyril Connolly

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