Cyril Connolly Quotes

Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.

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.

In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?

Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.

Promise is the capacity for letting people down.

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

No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.

Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.

The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.

Beautiful women must think about their beauty as capitalists think about their investments or politicians about their majorities; it is all they have to insure their places in the world.

Sheep with a nasty side.

The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.

In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient; afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.

The greatest problem with women is how to contrive that they should seem our equals

The artist secretes nostalgia around life.

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.

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

An aesthetic movement with a revolutionary dynamism and no popular appeal should proceed quite otherwise than by public scandal, publicity stunt, noisy expulsion and excommunication.

What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?

Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom.

Most of the beauty of women evaporates when they achieve domestic happiness at the price of their independence.

Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

It is a consolation of human life that the sick forget what it is like to feel well, or the miserable to be happy.

In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.

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.

Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.

When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.", February 25, 1933]

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Hate is the consequence of fear we fear something before we hate it a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.

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

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we learn to walk.

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those that do.

A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion for the instinctual tribes must be satisfied.

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self.

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

Hate is the consequence of fear we fear something before we hate it a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.