Myles Connolly > Quotes

“Your failure is measured by your aspirations. Aspire not, and you cannot fail. Columbus died in chains. Joan or Arc was burned at the stake. Let us all live snugly -- and life will soon be little more than a thick, gelatinous stream of comfortability and ignorance.”
― Myles Connolly, Mr. Blue

“Talk is one of man's privileges, and with a little care it may be one of his blessings. The successful conversationalist is not the epigram-maker, for sustained brilliance is blinding. The successful conversationalist says unusual things in a usual way. The successful conversationalist is not the man who does not think stupid things, but the man who does not say the stupid things he thinks. Silence is essential to every happy conversation. But not too much silence. Too much silence may mean boredom, or bewilderment. And it may mean scorn. For silence is an able weapon of pride.”
― Myles Connolly, Mr. Blue

“The biographer exaggerates the serious side of man to give him importance, for it has always been felt, peculiarly enough, that seriousness is a sign of importance. The biographer stresses a man's work so much that the reader is led to believe that the subject did little else. And yet all men loaf far more than they work. All great men especially. It is a misfortune that the seriousness of men lives after them while their gayety dies with them. There is great need of a new school of biographers. And there is, similarly, great need for a new school of historians. The history of the past, especially of the distant past, reads much like a long and somber obituary. And yet, those men of other days were as gay and gayer than we. As with individuals so with peoples: their gayety dies with them but their seriousness goes on forever.”
― Myles Connolly, Mr. Blue

“Years ago when we possessed knowledge of the things you see here, we discovered they did not bring peace. They brought only hate and insatiable ambition, tension and strife and fear. Our people were constantly at war with their environment and with themselves, and, too often, with their neighbors. Somehow the concentrated pursuit of knowledge seemed usually to lead to unhappiness.”
― Myles Connolly, Dan England and the Noonday Devil

“It is because most of us are such poseurs to ourselves that we so readily find a poseur out.”
― Myles Connolly, Mr. Blue

“The art he liked was dynamic art, the art that changed skylines, the art that created beautiful customs, that inspired men and women to love one another, the art, in brief, that transformed lives. The art that would do that tomorrow, he maintained, was the art of the motion picture. "Once," he said, "the cathedral builders and the troubadours, interpreting truth, created a beauty that was as current as language and almost as essential as blood. Then came the printed word to spread confusion, to throw a twilight over the world in which men became little more than shadows chasing shadows. But now, we have a new art, luminous, vivid, simple, stirring, persuasive, direct, universal, illimitable—the animated picture. It can create a new people, gracious and graceful, sensitive, kindly, religious, a people discovering in beauty the happiest revelation of God. No art has ever had the future the motion picture has. If it fails, no art shall have had as great and lamentable a failure.”
― Myles Connolly, Mr. Blue

“Kindness, we have discovered—and I know this will sound strange to you—is more important than chemistry, and humility of far greater value than higher mathematics.”
― Myles Connolly, Dan England and the Noonday Devil

“Catholics take their Church for granted,” he explained. “We even take our Lord in the tabernacle for granted. But you mustn’t be too hard on us. All children take their home and their father for granted. We are spoiled children.”
― Myles Connolly, Dan England and the Noonday Devil

“I have since noticed that people with an unusually strong love of color have most often little ear for music. Any taste they may possess is for obviously emotional, preferably sentimental, music. To them the world is visible music; to them, as to the poet, the stars are melodies and the sunset makes music in the sky.”
― Myles Connolly, Mr. Blue

“It was a strange world that witnessed this day of jubilation. The peoples of the whole earth had become slaves of a few masters. They had been herded into vast industrial centers, great mountains of stone and steel, banding the round earth like mountain chains, rising like huge wens on the face of the globe. But these men and women were not ordinary slaves. They were creatures of the machinery of a mechanical life, inferiors of the machines they operated, subsidiary attachments to the monsters of a new age.”
― Myles Connolly, Mr. Blue