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 β 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.
When time permits, I try to see interesting people in the cities I visit. In Seattle, I met Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, who is shy in personality but flamboyant in his philanthropy.
I will not be alone if I am my true self. Only by trading my true self for the companionship of another have I ever made myself alone. Because when I gave up my real self, I wound up resenting my "significant other" for "making me" do that-and it was this resentment that ate away at our relationship.
A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.
The way that same-sex marriage should reach the federal level is that it absolutely should be decided by the Supreme Court as quickly as possible. It's a 14th Amendment issue. There's no argument about it.
Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer - that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with the people you'd left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn't love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.
You can't be angry with me, because I am a hundred times more severely punished than you, if only by the fact that I shall never see you again.
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