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Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.

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
Wisdom
Engenders
Passion
Infatuated
Infatuation
Avarice
Purity
Folly
Ignorance
Darkness

More quotes by 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.
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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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Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
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Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.
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We fear something before we hate.
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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
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What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?
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The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
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Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.
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We create the world in which we live if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.
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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.
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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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Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
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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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The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
Cyril Connolly
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The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
Cyril Connolly
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There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defense-line of custom and habit we must sleep and therefore we must dream.
Cyril Connolly
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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
Cyril Connolly
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There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.
Cyril Connolly
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Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
Cyril Connolly