Evelyn Waugh Quotes

181 Sourced Quotes

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

Evelyn Waugh
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.

Evelyn Waugh
While still a young man, John Courteney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, "achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters."

Evelyn Waugh
I do not aspire to advise my sovereign in her choice of servants.
On why he did not vote

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

Evelyn Waugh
There is practically no sense that is not violated every time we return from the country or the sea to Paris or London or New York.

Evelyn Waugh
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.

Evelyn Waugh
From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people. It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity. Their sons and daughters rarely mate with humankind except their own blood relations.

Evelyn Waugh
Medical science has oppressed us with a new huge burden of longevity. It is in that last undesired decade, when passion is cold, appetites feeble, curiosity dulled and experience has begotten cynicism, that accidia lies in wait as the final temptation to destruction.

Evelyn Waugh
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.

Evelyn Waugh
Suffering is none the less acute and much more lasting when it is put into words.

Evelyn Waugh
Beavers bred in captivity, inhabiting a concrete pool, will, if given the timber, fatuously go through all the motions of damming an ancestral stream.

Evelyn Waugh
Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic.

Evelyn Waugh
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.

Evelyn Waugh
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.

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

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

Evelyn Waugh
I am suing Lord Beaverbrook for libel and hope for some lovely tax-free money in damages. He has very conveniently told some lies about me.

Evelyn Waugh
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.

Evelyn Waugh
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.

Evelyn Waugh
The better sort of Ishmaelites have been Christian for many centuries and will not publicly eat human flesh uncooked in Lent, without special and costly dispensation from their bishop.

Evelyn Waugh
Never get mixed up in a Welsh wrangle. It doesn't end in blows like an Irish one, but goes on forever.

Evelyn Waugh
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.

Evelyn Waugh
If, for instance, they have heard something from the postman, they attribute it to a semi-official statement; if they have fallen into conversation with a stranger at a bar, they can conscientiously describe him as a source that has hitherto proved unimpeachable. It is only when the journalist is reporting a whim of his own, and one to which he attaches minor importance, that he defines it as the opinion of well-informed circles.

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

Evelyn Waugh
O god thou has appointed three score years and ten as man's allotted span but O god statistics go to prove that comparatively few ever attain that age.

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

Evelyn Waugh
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.

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

Evelyn Waugh
The Welsh are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing. Sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.

Evelyn Waugh