Evelyn Waugh Quotes

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

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

I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets; I shall live long.

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

The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.

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

Beer commercials are so patriotic: Made the American Way. What does that have to do with America? Is that what America stands for? Feeling sluggish and urinating frequently?

Wine is a bride who brings a great dowry to the man who woos her persistently and gracefully.

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.

... To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well.

After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.

You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.

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

To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.

Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.'-William Boot

I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.

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

Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly; the best you can hope for is to be a bore.

The most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana Cigar.

One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric.

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.

Yes, cider and tinned salmon are the staple diet of the agricultural classes.

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

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

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

It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.

The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it. Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself.

Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.

Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher

I don't believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn't been told about it. It's like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn't been told it existed.

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

O God, make me good, but not yet.

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

We possess nothing certainly except the past

When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.

For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.

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.

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

There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

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

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.

We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.

We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.

I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.

We are American at puberty. We die French.

If it could only be like this always - always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper.