Education Quote by Cyril Connolly

Connolly’s line reads like a moral equation, but it’s really a diagnosis of how people talk themselves into ruin. By pairing “Purity” with “Wisdom,” he isn’t pitching saintliness so much as a disciplined clarity: the kind of mental hygiene that keeps a writer, a critic, or any thinking person from confusing appetite with insight. The syntax does the heavy lifting. “Engenders” makes virtue sound almost biological, as if clear perception is a byproduct of restraint rather than a heroic achievement.

Then he twists the knife. “Passion” doesn’t lead to art or love here; it “engenders…avarice.” That’s Connolly’s cynicism about modern desire: once you surrender to heat, you start bargaining, collecting, hoarding. Passion becomes acquisitive, less Romeo-and-Juliet than consumer culture with its halo of romance. It’s also a jab at the literary life Connolly knew well, where ambition can masquerade as feeling and “intensity” becomes a cover for wanting more - praise, attention, status.

The final triad is the bleakest. “Ignorance” breeds not just “folly” but “infatuation and darkness,” a slide from mere mistake into self-enchantment and then into obscurity. Infatuation is the key word: ignorance doesn’t only misinform; it seduces. Connolly, the journalist-critic watching mass opinion harden into fashion and ideology, is warning that unexamined minds don’t simply lack light - they actively generate shadows.