Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable. Cyril Connolly More Quotes by Cyril Connolly More Quotes From Cyril Connolly We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny. Cyril Connolly egotism tyranny happiness The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post. Cyril Connolly peeking lamps way 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. Cyril Connolly golden-moments pleasure pain Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body. Cyril Connolly body spirit lying The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck. Cyril Connolly tipping sitting rivers We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving. Cyril Connolly love There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be traveling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love. Cyril Connolly party writing book The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married. Cyril Connolly lonely dream love The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food. Cyril Connolly solitude vices food 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? Cyril Connolly garbage-cans men years In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient; afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable. Cyril Connolly unbearable emotional feelings No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind. Cyril Connolly quality literature mind Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius. Cyril Connolly intelligence intellectual revenge If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are; like fishes not meant to swim. Cyril Connolly wicked atheism swim Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality. Cyril Connolly sadness wind reality No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book. Cyril Connolly wisdom birthday book Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice. Cyril Connolly optimism self inspirational There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another... It is when we begin to hurt those whom we love that the guilt with which we are born becomes intolerable, and since all those whom we love intensely and continuously grow part of us, and since we hate ourselves in them, so we torture ourselves and them together. Cyril Connolly pain hate hurt 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. Cyril Connolly home beach children 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. Cyril Connolly pain strong love
