Cyril Connolly famous quotes

04-23-2025

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

#Inspirational #Respect #Writing
The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Health #Character #Men
Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Lying #Autumn #Sun
While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Alive #Literature
All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Appreciation #People #Ego
The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Loss #Purpose #Way
Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Children #Fear #Hate
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Morning #Men #Cities
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Funny #Death #Fear
The books I haven't written are better than the books other people have.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Book #People #Career Success
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

#Life #Success #Secret
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Life #Fear #Literature
Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Inspirational #Nice #Writing
Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Memories #Cards #Literature
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Art #Writing #Literature
For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
-- Cyril Connolly

#Freedom #Liberty #Action
If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Wisdom #Thinking #Lazy
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Happiness #Passion #Justice
It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Country #Nature #Book
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.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Animal #Thinking #Misery
Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Memories #Wine #Sunshine
Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Reality #History #Drug
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.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Revolutionary #Surrealism #Aesthetic
If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Morning #Lying #Night
In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Sex #War #Males
Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Literature #Salad #Garlic
Beneath this mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivilous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit ridden, I let it reform.
-- Cyril Connolly

#Dream #Selfish #Night

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