Quote

When in doubt, choose greatness.

Cyril Connolly

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Greatness
Choose
Doubt

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

Image
Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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
Image
Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
Cyril Connolly
Image
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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
Image
The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
Cyril Connolly
Image
We fear something before we hate.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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.
Cyril Connolly
Image
No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
Cyril Connolly