Love Quote by Cyril Connolly

Connolly’s line cuts greed down to size by refusing to treat it as appetite or ambition. He frames it as panic with better tailoring: not the bold, villainous craving we dramatize, but a defensive reflex, a clutching at resources to keep dread at bay. Pairing greed with “the love of comfort” is the tell. Comfort sounds harmless, even civilized; Connolly insinuates it’s often just fear that has learned table manners. Greed is comfort’s aggressive sibling, built from the same anxious material.

The syntax does a lot of work. “Like” is a quiet bridge that collapses moral hierarchies: the soft vice and the hard vice share one engine. And calling it “a kind of fear” dodges sermonizing. He doesn’t thunder about evil; he diagnoses. That clinical restraint is its own indictment, the way a journalist can be more brutal than a preacher by sounding almost bored with human excuses.

Context matters: Connolly wrote out of a 20th-century British literary world shadowed by depression, war, rationing, and the status anxieties of class. In that environment, acquisition and coziness aren’t just luxuries; they’re hedges against instability and humiliation. The subtext is unflattering: much of what passes for “prudence” or “good taste” is terror of falling, of being exposed as precarious.

It works because it flips the self-flattering story we tell about wanting more. Greed isn’t confidence; it’s insecurity hoarding. Comfort isn’t peace; it’s avoidance. Connolly makes fear the puppet master, and suddenly the respectable motives look as twitchy as the disreputable ones.