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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

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
First
Gods
Destroy
Intelligence
Promise
Prelude
Talent
Promising
Call
Neurosis
Wish
Sarcasm
Firsts
Sarcastic

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It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
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Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
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The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
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What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?
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Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.
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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.
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Hate is the consequence of fear we fear something before we hate a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.
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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.
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There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.
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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
Cyril Connolly
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There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
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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.
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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 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.
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Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.
Cyril Connolly
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There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.
Cyril Connolly
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Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.
Cyril Connolly
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Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
Cyril Connolly
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If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.
Cyril Connolly