All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
Interpretation
Charming individuals often mask their need for validation from others.
This quote by Cyril Connolly suggests that the appealing qualities of charming people may hide a deeper vulnerability — their reliance on the approval and appreciation of those around them. This dependence can indicate insecurity, revealing that beneath their charming facade lies a yearning for external validation, which could impact their true sense of self-worth.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a discussion about social dynamics.
When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?
A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.
The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.
When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.
Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory.
Each child’s story is worthy of telling. There shouldn’t be a sliding scale of death. The weight of it is crushing.
I was always aware of what the language I was using meant in terms of my bond with my parents - how it defined the lines of affection between us. When I spoke English, I felt I wasn't completely their child any more but the child of another language.
He shook my hand and said goodbye with a sentence that might have been either good advice or a threat: "Take good care of yourself.
When once married people begin to attack me with, 'Oh! you will think very differently, when you are married,' I can only say, 'No I shall not'; and then they say again, 'Yes you will,' and there is an end to it.
Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
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