Daily Inspiration Quote by Cyril Connolly

Connolly takes the scolding word the Protestant work ethic loves most - idleness - and flips it into a brag about attention. Calling it a "coarse name" is doing a lot of work: it frames the accusation as something blunt and philistine, the kind of label society slaps on anyone who refuses to translate every hour into output. His counter-definition is almost mischievous. He doesn't deny the behavior; he disputes the vocabulary. What looks like laziness from the outside becomes, from the inside, an "infinite capacity" - not just to waste time, but to inhabit it.

The line is also a small act of self-defense, which is where its bite lives. Connolly, a journalist and critic in a culture that prized both industry and literary prestige, knew the shame that attaches to unproductive days. By insisting he is "living in the present", he gives indolence a philosophical alibi, smuggling mindfulness in through the back door decades before it became a lifestyle product. The phrase "infinite capacity" is hyperbole with a wink; it hints at the narrator's awareness that he might be romanticizing procrastination even as he does it.

Contextually, Connolly wrote from the anxious middle ground between art and obligation: the critic who can diagnose greatness, the writer who fears he can't deliver it. This quip turns that anxiety into style. It suggests a person choosing, at least rhetorically, to be judged as a sensualist of time rather than a failure of ambition.