Cyril Connolly Quotes - Page 3

There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity, our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may be able to cease from hating... Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.

The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.

How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?

No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.

Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.

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

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

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.

The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.

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.

Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.

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.

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 river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.

We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.

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.

Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Promise is the capacity for letting people down.

A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant and ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality.

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.

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

Sheep with a nasty side.

Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.

Approaching forty, I had a singular dream in which I almost grasped the meaning and understood the nature of what it is that wastes in wasted time.