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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

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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
Culture
Decay
Next
Corruption
Decadence
Every
Factors
Manure
Luxury
Epoch
Constant
Weariness
Civilization
Superstition
Becomes
Skepticism
Goal
Superstitions

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
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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
Cyril Connolly
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We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
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Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
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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.
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Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
Cyril Connolly
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It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
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 artist secretes nostalgia around life.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
Cyril Connolly
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The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
Cyril Connolly
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Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
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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How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?
Cyril Connolly
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Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
Cyril Connolly
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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
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That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
Cyril Connolly