Top 150 Cyril Connolly Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.”

— Cyril Connolly

52. “Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink them and we choose our direction.”

— Cyril Connolly

53. “Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.”

— Cyril Connolly

54. “Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.”

— Cyril Connolly

55. “Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.”

— Cyril Connolly

56. “The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.”

— Cyril Connolly

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

— Cyril Connolly

58. “The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.”

— Cyril Connolly

59. “It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.”

— Cyril Connolly

60. “For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?”

— Cyril Connolly

61. “The man who is master of his passions is Reason’s slave.”

— Cyril Connolly

62. “The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.”

— Cyril Connolly

63. “Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.”

— Cyril Connolly

64. “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.”

— Cyril Connolly

65. “The true work of art is the one which the seventh wave of genius throws up the beach where the undertow of time cannot drag it back.”

— Cyril Connolly

66. “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

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

— Cyril Connolly

68. “There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.”

— Cyril Connolly

69. “That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.”

— Cyril Connolly

70. “There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.”

— Cyril Connolly

71. “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.”

— Cyril Connolly

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

— Cyril Connolly

73. “The greatest problem with women is how to contrive that they should seem our equals.”

— Cyril Connolly

74. “Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.”

— Cyril Connolly

75. “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.”

— Cyril Connolly

76. “Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.”

— Cyril Connolly

77. “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.”

— Cyril Connolly

78. “The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.”

— Cyril Connolly

79. “The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain.”

— Cyril Connolly

80. “Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.”

— Cyril Connolly

81. “Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.”

— Cyril Connolly

82. “When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.”

— Cyril Connolly

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

— Cyril Connolly

84. “Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.”

— Cyril Connolly

85. “No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.”

— Cyril Connolly

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

— Cyril Connolly

87. “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.”

— Cyril Connolly

88. “A rune for the very bored: when very bored say to yourself: “It was during the next twenty minutes that there occurred one of those tiny incidents which revolutionizes the whole course of our life and alter the face of history. Truly we are the playthings of enormous fates.”

— Cyril Connolly

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

— Cyril Connolly

90. “A love affair is a grafting operation. “What has once been joined never forgets”. There is a moment when the graft takes; up to then it is possible without difficulty the separation which afterwards comes only through breaking off a great hunk of oneself; the ingrown fibre of hours, days, years.”

— Cyril Connolly

91. “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.”

— Cyril Connolly

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

— Cyril Connolly

93. “The Expulsion from Eden is an act of vindictive womanish spite; the Fall of Man, as recounted in the Bible, comes nearer to the Fall of God.”

— Cyril Connolly

94. “There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.”

— Cyril Connolly

95. “No opinions, no ideas, no real knowledge of anything, no ideals, no inspiration; a fat, slothful, querulous, greedy, impotent carcass; a stump, a decaying belly washed up on the shore... Always tired, always bored, always hurt, always hating.”

— Cyril Connolly

96. “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.”

— Cyril Connolly

97. “The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.”

— Cyril Connolly

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

— Cyril Connolly

99. “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.”

— Cyril Connolly

100. “Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.”

— Cyril Connolly