Top 300 Evelyn Waugh Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

6. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

10. “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

11. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

14. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

16. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

18. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

20. “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

21. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

30. “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

31. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

33. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “Of children as of procreation – the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable.”

— Evelyn Waugh

39. “I’m quite deaf now; such a comfort.”

— Evelyn Waugh

40. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

42. “I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.”

— Evelyn Waugh

43. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

44. “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

45. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

46. “That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.”

— Evelyn Waugh

47. “That’s your little mob in there,’ said Grimes; ‘you let them out at eleven.’ ‘But what am I to teach them?’ said Paul in sudden panic. ‘Oh, I shouldn’t try to teach them anything, not just yet, anyway. Just keep them quiet.”

— Evelyn Waugh

48. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

50. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh