239 Quotes by Cyril Connolly

The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain.

The man who is master of his passions is Reason’s slave.

We pay for vice by the knowledge that we are wicked; we pay for pleasure when we find out too late that we are nothing.

The books I haven’t written are better than the books other people have.

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

He felt old and miserable, going through life trying to peddle a personality of which people would not even accept a free sample.

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.

A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs, and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; – such is our personality.

A woman’s desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.