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
Doubt
Greatness
Choose

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

Image
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.
Cyril Connolly
Image
An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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
Image
Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
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 lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
Cyril Connolly
Image
When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
Cyril Connolly
Image
For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
Cyril Connolly
Image
When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
Cyril Connolly
Image
No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
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
That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
Cyril Connolly
Image
English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid one attractive, one vulgar one noble, one ape-like one serious and sincere, one undignified and false one far-sighted, one short EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.
Cyril Connolly