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Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.

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
Peace
Morbid
War
Surplus
Civilians
Seeks
Remedy
Dues
Condition
Conditions

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
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In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
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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.
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It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
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Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.
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Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
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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.
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No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
Cyril Connolly
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Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.
Cyril Connolly
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When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
Cyril Connolly
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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
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Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
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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Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
Cyril Connolly