Evelyn Waugh Quotes (76 Quotes)


    Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker

    Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.

    If politicians and scientist were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

    All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.

    There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.


    I'm one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.

    There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

    My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.

    Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.

    Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

    He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

    Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

    Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

    Enclosing every thin man, there's a fat man demanding elbow-room.

    News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.

    You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.

    Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.

    Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.

    His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.

    Other nations use 'force'; we Britons alone use 'Might'.

    One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

    Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.

    The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.


    We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.

    It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.


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