Top 300 Evelyn Waugh Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “You can’t ever tell what’s going to hurt people.”

— Evelyn Waugh

52. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

54. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

58. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

59. “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.’-William Boot.”

— Evelyn Waugh

60. “How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

62. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

64. “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

65. “He was entrancing, with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.”

— Evelyn Waugh

66. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

68. “When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.”

— Evelyn Waugh

69. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

70. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

71. “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

72. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

74. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

75. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

76. “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

77. “Never get mixed up in a Welsh wrangle. It doesn’t end in blows like an Irish one, but goes on forever.”

— Evelyn Waugh

78. “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

79. “Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

82. “All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

84. “Beware the Anglo-Catholics. They’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents.” – Cousin Jasper.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

87. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

88. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

89. “If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

91. “One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.”

— Evelyn Waugh

92. “No one is ever holy without suffering.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

94. “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

95. “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

96. “You’ll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first...”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

98. “You spend the first term at Oxford meeting interesting and exciting people and the rest of your time there avoiding them.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

100. “Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It’s supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though all mankind, and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us.”

— Evelyn Waugh