239 Quotes by Cyril Connolly

When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?

Friendships that last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from them.

Imagination equals nostalgia for the past, the absent; it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signaling to be let out

The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.

It is a consolation of human life that the sick forget what it is like to feel well, or the miserable to be happy.

The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him

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.

The only happy talkers are dandies who extract pleasure from the very perishability of their material and who would not be able to tolerate the isolation of all other forms of composition; for most good talkers, when they have run down, are miserable; they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to dispense it in noises upon the air.