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

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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
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The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
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For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
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Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
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An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
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Hate is the consequence of fear we fear something before we hate a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.
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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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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.
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Beautiful women must think about their beauty as capitalists think about their investments or politicians about their majorities it is all they have to insure their places in the world.
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A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
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Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
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No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
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There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.
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There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
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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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The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
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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.
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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
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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
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