Quote

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

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Cyril Connolly
Age: 71 †
Born: 1903
Born: September 10
Died: 1974
Died: November 26
Critic
Literary Critic
Novelist
Writer
Coventry
England
UK
Cyril Vernon Connolly
Action
Brought
Paralyses
Thought
Atheism
Retained
Without
Sin
Poisons
Belief
Paralysis
Faith
Redemption
Christian
Poison
Lost
Christians
Sense
Saving

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
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We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
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When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
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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.
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Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
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In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.
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There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
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Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.
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Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
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In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
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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.
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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.
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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
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When in doubt, choose greatness.
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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
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Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.
Cyril Connolly
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As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
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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
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We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly