Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Religion
Cannot
Without
Pessimistic
Disappointing
God
Atheism
Soon
Personal

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

Image
Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.
Cyril Connolly
Image
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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
Image
Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
Cyril Connolly
Image
We fear something before we hate.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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
Image
When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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
Image
In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?
Cyril Connolly
Image
No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
Cyril Connolly
Image
What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?
Cyril Connolly
Image
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
Cyril Connolly
Image
How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?
Cyril Connolly
Image
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
Image
Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
Cyril Connolly