Top 300 Evelyn Waugh Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “You’ll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first...”

— Evelyn Waugh

102. “The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.”

— Evelyn Waugh

103. “My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.”

— Evelyn Waugh

104. “We don’t get much time to read the papers.” “No, I suppose you don’t. I envy you. There’s nothing in them but lies,” he added sadly. “You can’t believe a word they say. But it’s all good. Very good indeed. It helps to keep one’s spirits up,” he said from the depths of his gloom.”

— Evelyn Waugh

105. “If we can’t stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.”

— Evelyn Waugh

106. “She had heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and was furious that she had not been asked.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

108. “Sebastian’s life was governed by a code of such imperatives. ‘I must have pillar-box red pyjamas,’ ‘I have to stay in bed until the sun works round the windows,’ ‘I’ve absolutely got to drink champagne tonight.”

— Evelyn Waugh

109. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

111. “We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.”

— Evelyn Waugh

112. “A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.”

— Evelyn Waugh

113. “Of the many smells of Athens two seem to me the most characteristic – that of garlic, bold and deadly like acetylene gas. and that of dust, soft and warm and caressing like tweed.”

— Evelyn Waugh

114. “We can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales.”

— Evelyn Waugh

115. “Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn’t a saint. 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 pretend it’s God and hate that. I suppose you think that’s all bosh.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

117. “In that dark hour I was aghast to realise that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died. I suddenly knew I had no desire or tenderness or esteem. Nothing remained except the chill bonds of law and duty an custom.”

— Evelyn Waugh

118. “Here I am,′ I thought, ’back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.”

— Evelyn Waugh

119. “We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.”

— Evelyn Waugh

120. “Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.”

— Evelyn Waugh

121. “Julia used to say, ‘Poor Sebastian. It’s something chemical in him.’ That was the cant phrase of the time, derived from heaven knows what misconception of popular science. ‘There’s something chemical between them’ was used to explain the overmastering hate or love of any two people. It was the old concept of determinism in a new form. I do not believe there was anything chemical in my friend.”

— Evelyn Waugh

122. “It was a morning of ethereal splendor – such a morning as Noah knew as he gazed from his pitchy bulwarks over limitless, sunlit waters while the dove circled and mounted and became lost in the shining heavens; such a morning as only the angels saw on the first day of that rash cosmic experiment that had resulted, at the moment, in landing Corker and Pigge here in the mud, stiff and unshaven and disconsolate.”

— Evelyn Waugh

123. “The Second World War wasn’t bad provided you were with nice people.”

— Evelyn Waugh

124. “I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”

— Evelyn Waugh

125. “At first it was impressive, but after half and hour deadly monotonous. It was like everything German – overdone.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

127. “He seems to be in a very bad temper.” “Not really. He’s always like that to waiters. You see he’s a communist. Most of the staff of The Twopence are – they’re University men, you see. Pappenhacker says that every time you are polite to a proletarian you are helping to bolster up the capitalist system. He’s very clever of course, but he gets rather unpopular.”

— Evelyn Waugh

128. “Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.”

— Evelyn Waugh

129. “I’m in the soup!”

— Evelyn Waugh

130. “Saints are simply men and women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.”

— Evelyn Waugh

131. “The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.”

— Evelyn Waugh

132. “When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood – innocence, God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that. He loved me for a time, quite a short time, as a man loves his own strength; it is simpler for a woman; she has not all these ways of loving. Now Alex is very fond of me and I protect him from his own innocence.”

— Evelyn Waugh

133. “I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

135. “Always wear a tall hat on Sundays during term. It is by that, more than anything, that a man is judged.’ And do you know,” continued my father, snuffling deeply, “I always did. Some men did, some didn’t. I never saw any difference between them or heard it commented on, but I always wore mine. It only shows what effect judicious advice can have, properly delivered at the right moment.”

— Evelyn Waugh

136. “My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one gray morning of war-time.”

— Evelyn Waugh

137. “Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

139. “I am annoyed to find myself continually described by people whom I have never set eyes on as bad-tempered.”

— Evelyn Waugh

140. “Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.”

— Evelyn Waugh

141. “We think it a very promising little war. A microcosm, as you might say, of world drama.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

143. “I’m one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.”

— Evelyn Waugh

144. “It’s not to be expected that an ox and an ass should worship at the crib. Animals are always doing the oddest things in the lives of the saints. It’s all part of the poetry, the Alice-In-Wonderland side of religion.”

— Evelyn Waugh

145. “Here it seemed some of them slept for there were divan beds covered with blankets only and a large, much undenticulated, comb.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

147. “My father and I were never intimate in the sense of my coming to him with confidences or seeking advice. Our relationship was rather that of host and guest. Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

149. “We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors, do hereby proclaim...”

— Evelyn Waugh

150. “From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people. It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity. Their sons and daughters rarely mate with humankind except their own blood relations.”

— Evelyn Waugh