Top 300 Evelyn Waugh Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”

— Evelyn Waugh

2. “To understand all is to forgive all.”

— Evelyn Waugh

3. “If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.”

— Evelyn Waugh

4. “Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?”

— Evelyn Waugh

5. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

6. “One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

8. “O God, make me good, but not yet.”

— Evelyn Waugh

9. “If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper...”

— Evelyn Waugh

10. “Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.”

— Evelyn Waugh

11. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

12. “These memories, which are my life – for we possess nothing certainly except the past – were always with me.”

— Evelyn Waugh

13. “After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can’t trust a person.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

15. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

16. “A blow, expected, repeated, falling upon a bruise with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

18. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

19. “I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.”

— Evelyn Waugh

20. “We possess nothing certainly except the past.”

— Evelyn Waugh

21. “His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

24. “My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— Evelyn Waugh

28. “Quomondo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

— Evelyn Waugh

29. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

30. “The worse I am, the more I need God. I can’t shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him. Julia to Charles.”

— Evelyn Waugh

31. “Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. I felt stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed immediately after the nine o’clock news. I was always awake and fretful an hour before reveille. Here my last love died.”

— Evelyn Waugh

32. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

33. “Too late, old boy, too late. The saddest words in the English language.”

— Evelyn Waugh

34. “We are American at puberty. We die French.”

— Evelyn Waugh

35. “The languor of Youth – how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!”

— Evelyn Waugh

36. “It doesn’t matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.”

— Evelyn Waugh

37. “News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.”

— Evelyn Waugh

38. “It is typical of Oxford, I said, to start the new year in autumn.”

— Evelyn Waugh

39. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

41. “I had been there before; I knew all about it.”

— Evelyn Waugh

42. “Winston Churchill is always expecting rabbits to come out of an empty hat.”

— Evelyn Waugh

43. “Enclosing every thin man, there’s a fat man demanding elbow-room.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

45. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

46. “Conversion is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature into the real world God made; and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly.”

— Evelyn Waugh

47. “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?”

— Evelyn Waugh

48. “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

49. “That’s the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh