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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
Becomes
Skepticism
Goal
Superstitions
Culture
Decay
Next
Corruption
Decadence
Every
Factors
Manure
Luxury
Epoch
Constant
Weariness
Civilization
Superstition
More quotes by Cyril Connolly
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
Cyril Connolly
I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.
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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
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.
Cyril Connolly
The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.
Cyril Connolly
In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
Cyril Connolly
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.
Cyril Connolly
Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
Cyril Connolly
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
Cyril Connolly
An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
Cyril Connolly
Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
Cyril Connolly
When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
Cyril Connolly
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
Cyril Connolly
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
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
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
Cyril Connolly
Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
Cyril Connolly
When in doubt, choose greatness.
Cyril Connolly
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
Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
Cyril Connolly
