Top 202 Quotes & Sayings by Evelyn Waugh

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.

Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in 'Old Maid'; the player who is finally left with it has lost.

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.

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.

Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.

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

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

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.

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

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

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

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

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

What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?

Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

I put the words down and push them a bit.

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

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

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

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

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

I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

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

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

I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep.

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

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

We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.

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

In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.

If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.

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

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.

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

We possess nothing certainly except the past

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.

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.

The great charm in argument is really finding one's own opinions, not other people's.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed.

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read.

Properly understood, style is not a seductive decoration added to a functional structure; it is of the essence of a work of art. The necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance, and individuality; these three qualities combine to form a preservative which ensures the nearest approximation to permanence in the fugitive art of letters.

There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book.

Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.

A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions , but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline.

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?

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.

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

Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.

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.

I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.

The tourist debauches the great monuments of antiquity, a comic figure, always inapt in his comments, incongruous in his appearance; ...avarice and deceit attack him at every step; the shops that he patronizes are full of forgeries... But we need feel no scruple or twinge of uncertainty; 'we' are travelers and cosmopolitans; the tourist is the other fellow.

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.

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

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

O God, make me good, but not yet.

Beware of writing to me. I always answer ... My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing letters. If someone thanked him for a wedding present, he thanked them for thanking him and there was no end to the exchange but death.

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

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

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.