Top 202 Quotes & Sayings by Evelyn Waugh - Page 2

Evelyn Waugh: How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William? Sir William Beveridge: I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it. Waugh: I get mine spreading alarm and despondency and I get more satisfaction than you do.

He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.

If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

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

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

Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.

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

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

O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.

Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.

I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

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

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

We are American at puberty. We die French.

They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don't expect you to listen.... It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.

Civilization - and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe - has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance ... It is no longer possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis on which it rests ... Christianity ... is in greater need of combative strength than it has been for centuries.

He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.

I can't bare you when you're not amusing.

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.

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

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 think there's almost nothing I can't excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.

...its a rather pleasant change when all your life you've had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.

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

To understand all is to forgive all.

I'm quite deaf now; such a comfort.

I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. ... Or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won't quite despair of me in the end.

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

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

I think it's one of the kindest things you can do to the very wicked, to give them time to repent.

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.

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

No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it's God and hate that.

Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?

We can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales.

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.

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door.

Here I am,' I thought, 'back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.

If one's object is ascetic, it is far better to stay in London or Paris or New York; there is practically no extreme of heat or cold, physical risk, loneliness, hunger or thirst that cannot, with a little ingenuity, be conveniently achieved in the centres of civilization.

The Roman Catholic Church has the unique power of keeping remote control over human souls which have once been part of her. G.K. Chesterton has compared this to the fisherman's line, which allows the fish the illusion of free play in the water and yet has him by the hook; in his own time the fisherman by a 'twitch upon the thread' draws the fish to land.

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

Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.

Of the many smells of Athens two seem to me the most characteristic - that of garlic, bold and deadly like acetylene gas. and that of dust, soft and warm and caressing like tweed.

If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.

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

Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days - such as that day - when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour.

The langour of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this come and go with us through life...These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.

Saints are simply men & women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.

You don't remove the evil in a person by killing the person.

Once you start changing a name, you see, there's no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.

If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.

Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.

The only thing that it is advisable to know in any language is the numerals; and even there, you can do a lot with the fingers.

Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

There is an Easter sense in which all things are made new in the risen Christ. A tiny gleam of this is reflected in all true art.

I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason that he is anxious to conceal.