Top 150 Cyril Connolly Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 3

101. “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.”

— Cyril Connolly

102. “Promise is the capacity for letting people down.”

— Cyril Connolly

103. “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.”

— Cyril Connolly

104. “It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.”

— Cyril Connolly

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

— Cyril Connolly

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

— Cyril Connolly

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

— Cyril Connolly

108. “The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.”

— Cyril Connolly

109. “It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.”

— Cyril Connolly

110. “I am now forced to admit that anxiety is my true condition, occasionally intruded on by work, pleasure, melancholy or despair.”

— Cyril Connolly

111. “Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.”

— Cyril Connolly

112. “A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs, and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; – such is our personality.”

— Cyril Connolly

113. “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

114. “Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.”

— Cyril Connolly

115. “In my religion, there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry, and doubt.”

— Cyril Connolly

116. “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.”

— Cyril Connolly

117. “When every unkind word about women has been said, we have still to admit, with Byron, that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted, more unselfish and more emotionally sincere. When the long fuse of cruelty, deceit and revenge is set alight, it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it.”

— Cyril Connolly

118. “Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered.”

— Cyril Connolly

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

— Cyril Connolly

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

— Cyril Connolly

121. “English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid; one attractive, one vulgar; one noble, one ape-like; one serious and sincere, one undignified and false; one far-sighted, one short; EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.”

— Cyril Connolly

122. “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.”

— Cyril Connolly

123. “We fear something before we hate it...”

— Cyril Connolly

124. “No taste is so acquired as that for someone else’s quality of mind.”

— Cyril Connolly

125. “How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?”

— Cyril Connolly

126. “We pay for vice by the knowledge that we are wicked; we pay for pleasure when we find out too late that we are nothing.”

— Cyril Connolly

127. “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

128. “He felt old and miserable, going through life trying to peddle a personality of which people would not even accept a free sample.”

— Cyril Connolly

129. “Like many lazy people, once I started work I could not stop; perhaps that is why we avoid it.”

— Cyril Connolly

130. “When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.”

— Cyril Connolly

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

— Cyril Connolly

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

— Cyril Connolly

133. “The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.”

— Cyril Connolly

134. “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.””

— Cyril Connolly

135. “The artist secretes nostalgia around life.”

— Cyril Connolly

136. “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.”

— Cyril Connolly

137. “Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.”

— Cyril Connolly

138. “A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion, for instinctual drives must be satisfied.”

— Cyril Connolly

139. “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.”

— Cyril Connolly

140. “As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.”

— Cyril Connolly

141. “The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.”

— Cyril Connolly

142. “The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.”

— Cyril Connolly

143. “An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.”

— Cyril Connolly

144. “Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.”

— Cyril Connolly

145. “We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.”

— Cyril Connolly

146. “A great writer created 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.”

— Cyril Connolly

147. “A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.”

— Cyril Connolly

148. “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.”

— Cyril Connolly

149. “Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” – “Meglio scrivere per se stessi e non avere un pubblico piuttosto che scrivere per gli altri e non essere se stessi”.”

— Cyril Connolly

150. “Nothing dates like hate and in literature a little of it goes a very long way.”

— Cyril Connolly