Top 300 Evelyn Waugh Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “The Second World War wasn’t bad provided you were with nice people.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

54. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

57. “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

58. “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

59. “When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating.”

— Evelyn Waugh

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “I’m in the soup!”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

68. “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

69. “There’s only one great evil in the world today. Despair.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

72. “I suppose it’s something to do with her black-brained religion not to take care of the body.”

— Evelyn Waugh

73. “One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. It is simply part of one’s life...”

— Evelyn Waugh

74. “So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.”

— Evelyn Waugh

75. “It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

77. “The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.”

— Evelyn Waugh

78. “But is there a difference between liking a thing and thinking it good?”

— Evelyn Waugh

79. “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.”

— Evelyn Waugh

80. “You can’t ever tell what’s going to hurt people.”

— Evelyn Waugh

81. “Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.”

— Evelyn Waugh

82. “To Father Rothschild no passage was worse than any other. He thought of the sufferings of the saints, the mutability of human nature, the Four Last Things, and between whiles repeated snatches of the penitential psalms.”

— Evelyn Waugh

83. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

95. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

96. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

98. “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

99. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh