Cyril Connolly was an English intellectual, writer, and literary critic. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon, which he founded in 1940. Connolly is best remembered for his autobiographical work, The Unquiet Grave, which was published in 1945.
What is the most famous quote by Cyril Connolly ?
Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
— Cyril Connolly
What can you learn from Cyril Connolly (Life Lessons)
- Cyril Connolly taught that life is to be lived to its fullest, and that one should take risks and embrace the unknown in order to find true fulfillment.
- He also believed that one should strive to find their own unique voice and perspective, and to never be afraid to express themselves.
- Finally, Connolly taught that it is important to be open to new ideas and experiences, and to never be afraid to challenge the status quo.
The most viral Cyril Connolly quotes you will be delighted to read
Following is a list of the best quotes, including various Cyril Connolly inspirational quotes, and other famous sayings by Cyril Connolly.
He [George Orwell] would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
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.
There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
We may assume that we keep people waiting symbolically because we do not wish to see them and that our anxiety is due not to being late, but to having to see them at all.
All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
Critique quotes by Cyril Connolly
Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the way of our happy union.
I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.
While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.
Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems
Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
Quotations by Cyril Connolly that are satire and reflection
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.
Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.
The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.
Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
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.
We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say.
A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.
Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
It is the fear of middle-age in the young, of old-age in the middle-aged, which is the prime cause of infidelity, that infallible rejuvenator.
No education is worth having that does not teach the lesson of concentration on a task, however unattractive. These lessons, if not learnt early, will be learnt, if at all, with pain and grief in later life.
Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
Promise is the capacity for letting people down.
Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.
From now on - specialize; never again make any concession to the ninety-nine percent of you which is like everyon else at the expense of the one percent which is unique.
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.
The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.
The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
The person who is master of their passions is reason's slave.
No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
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."
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.
The books I haven't written are better than the books other people have.
Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.