"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."

Connolly, Cyril on Decadence
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"Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph -- green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree."

Connolly, Cyril on Epitaphs
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"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."

Connolly, Cyril on Exile
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"The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life."

Connolly, Cyril on Food and Eating
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"In America every woman has her set of girl-friends; some are cousins, the rest are gained at school. These form a permanent committee who sit on each other's affairs, who come out together, marry and divorce together, and who end as those groups of bustling, heartless well-informed club-women who govern society. Against them the Couple of Ehepaar is helpless and Man in their eyes but a biological interlude."

Connolly, Cyril on Friends and Friendship
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"There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God."

Connolly, Cyril on God
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"Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear."

Connolly, Cyril on Greed
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"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."

Connolly, Cyril on Grief
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"A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom."

Connolly, Cyril on Hotels
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"Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present."

Connolly, Cyril on Idleness
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"We must select the Illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy."

Connolly, Cyril on Illusion
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"Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once."

Connolly, Cyril on Journalism and Journalists
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"A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends."

Connolly, Cyril on Laziness
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"We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving."

Connolly, Cyril on Love
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"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."

Connolly, Cyril on Lovers
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"Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the way of our happy union."

Connolly, Cyril on Marriage
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"The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married."

Connolly, Cyril on Marriage
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"The English masses are lovable: they are kind, decent, tolerant, practical and not stupid. The tragedy is that they are too many of them, and that they are aimless, having outgrown the servile functions for which they were encouraged to multiply. One day these huge crowds will have to seize power because there will be nothing else for them to do, and yet they neither demand power nor are ready to make use of it; they will learn only to be bored in a new way."

Connolly, Cyril on Masses
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"Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control."

Connolly, Cyril on Memory
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"In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female."

Connolly, Cyril on Men and Women
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"Imprisoned in every fat man, a thin one is wildly signaling to be let out."

Connolly, Cyril on Obesity
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"The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up."

Connolly, Cyril on Arts and Artists
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"The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure."

Connolly, Cyril on Arts and Artists
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"We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self."

Connolly, Cyril on Prison
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"As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers."

Connolly, Cyril on Publishing and Publishers
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"The person who is master of their passions is reason's slave."

Connolly, Cyril on Reason
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"Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual."

Connolly, Cyril on School
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"Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth."

Connolly, Cyril on Science and Scientists
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"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."

Connolly, Cyril on Sin
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"The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food."

Connolly, Cyril on Solitude
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"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."

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

Connolly, Cyril on Style
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"There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say."

Connolly, Cyril on Suicide
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"All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others."

Connolly, Cyril on Charm
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"Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising."

Connolly, Cyril on Talent
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"No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind."

Connolly, Cyril on Taste
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"Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether."

Connolly, Cyril on Terrorism
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"Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose."

Connolly, Cyril on Tranquility
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"Never would it occur to a child that a sheep, a pig, a cow or a chicken was good to eat, while, like Milton's Adam, he would eagerly make a meal off fruits, nuts, thyme, mint, peas and broad beans which penetrate further and stimulate not only the appetite but other vague and deep nostalgias. We are closer to the Vegetable Kingdom than we know; is it not for man alone that mint, thyme, sage, and rosemary exhale crush me and eat me! -- for us that opium poppy, coffee-berry, tea-plant and vine perfect themselves? Their aim is to be absorbed by us, even if it can only be achieved by attaching themselves to roast mutton."

Connolly, Cyril on Vegetarianism
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"Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of taste."

Connolly, Cyril on Vulgarity
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