Cyril Connolly

Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.

There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.

In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.

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.

It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.

The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.

The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.

There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.

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

Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.

Hate is the consequence of fear we fear something before we hate it a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

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.

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.