Words matter. These are the best Cyril Connolly Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.
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.
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.
The true index of a man’s character is the health of his wife.
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.
Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.
It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.
All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, – something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.
A great writer creates 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.
Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.
Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.
The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
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.
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.
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.
The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.
