Evelyn waugh quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I put the words down and push them a bit.

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.

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.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Beerbohm was a genius of the purest kind. He stands at the summit of his art.

Its theme-- the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters-- was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

We possess nothing certainly except the past

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

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

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.

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.

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

My father and I were never intimate in the sense of my coming to him with confidences or seeking advice. Our relationship was rather that of host and guest. Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

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.

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

She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and saying "I must read that, too, when I've the time," replace it and continue the search.

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.

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.

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

We are American at puberty. We die French.

To understand all is to forgive all.

O God, make me good, but not yet.

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

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.

...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.

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.

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

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.

All fates are ‘worse than death’.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

No one is ever holy without suffering.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.

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.

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.

Most writers in the course of their careers become thick-skinned and learn to accept vituperation, which in any other profession would be unimaginably offensive, as a healthy counterpoise to unintelligent praise.

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

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I'm quite deaf now; such a comfort.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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