Evelyn Waugh Quotes

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.

But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse.

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.

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.

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

His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.

The audiences certainly have declined. If I go to the theatre now I find people come there to eat and smoke and talk to one another. And look like scarecrows.

We are American at puberty. We die French.

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.

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

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

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

Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.

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

He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it [...]

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

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

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

Free as air; that's what they say- "free as air". Now they bring me my air in an iron barrel.

He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of food . . . of the intoxicating breath of bakeries and dullness of buns. . . . He planned dinners, of enchanting aromatic foods . . . endless dinners, in which one could alternate flavour with flavour from sunset to dawn without satiety, while one breathed great draughts of the bouquet of old brandy.

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

At first it was impressive, but after half and hour deadly monotonous. It was like everything German - overdone.

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

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.

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.

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.

Of children as of procreation -- the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable

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

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

Soon someone would say the fatal words, "Well, I think it’s time for me to go to bed.

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

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 had been there before; I knew all about it.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

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