Quote

The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.

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
Life
Uncivilized
Forgiven
Civilized
Likely
Atheism
Civilization
Literature

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

Image
When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
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
The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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
Image
When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
Cyril Connolly
Image
What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?
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
Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
Cyril Connolly
Image
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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
Image
We fear something before we hate.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
Cyril Connolly