Top 300 Evelyn Waugh Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. It is simply part of one’s life...”

— Evelyn Waugh

152. “There were thermal springs, and at the end of the preceding century the town had been laid out modestly as a spa. Hot water still ran in the bath house. Two old gardeners still kept some order in the ornamental grounds. The graded paths, each with a “view-point,” the ruins of a seat and of a kiosk, where once invalids had taken their.”

— Evelyn Waugh

153. “You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.”

— Evelyn Waugh

154. “It was not her way to make a conspicuous entry into anyone’s life, but towards the end of that week Sebastian said rather sourly: “You and mummy seem very thick,” and I realized that in fact I was being drawn into intimacy by swift, imperceptible stages, for she was impatient of any human relationship that fell short of it.”

— Evelyn Waugh

155. “An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.”

— Evelyn Waugh

156. “An artist must be a reactionary.”

— Evelyn Waugh

157. “Sebastian contra mundum.”

— Evelyn Waugh

158. “I can’t bare you when you’re not amusing.”

— Evelyn Waugh

159. “It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.”

— Evelyn Waugh

160. “Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.”

— Evelyn Waugh

161. “Sometimes,” Helena continued, “I have a terrible dream of the future. Not now, but presently, people may forget their loyalty to their kings and emperors and take power for themselves. Instead of letting one victim bear this frightful curse they will take it all on themselves, each one of them. Think of the misery of a whole world possessed of Power without Grace.”

— Evelyn Waugh

162. “Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.”

— Evelyn Waugh

163. “But I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon; I had had my finger in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening- of Browning’s renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo’s tube, spurned the friars, with their dusty tomes, and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech.”

— Evelyn Waugh

164. “The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth – all save this – come and go with us through life; again and again in riper years we experience, under a new stimulus, what we thought had been finally left behind, the authentic impulse to action, the renewal of power and its concentration on a new object; again and again a new truth is revealed to us in whose light all our previous knowledge must be rearranged.”

— Evelyn Waugh

165. “This, I did not need telling, was Anthony Blanche, the “aesthete” par excellence, a byword of iniquity from Cherwell Edge to Somerville.”

— Evelyn Waugh

166. “It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.”

— Evelyn Waugh

167. “I remember no syllable of them now, but the other, more ancient lore which I acquired that term will be with me in one shape or another to my last hour. “I like this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon”; that was enough then. Is more needed now?”

— Evelyn Waugh

168. “Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly; the best you can hope for is to be a bore.”

— Evelyn Waugh

169. “They are a very decent, generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. Always remember that, dear boy. It’s the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.”

— Evelyn Waugh

170. “He was fortified by a memory which kept only the good things and rejected the ill. Despite his sorrows, he had had a fair share of joys and these were ever fresh and accessible.”

— Evelyn Waugh

171. “There is proverbially a mystery among most men of new wealth, how they made their first ten thousand; it is the qualities they showed then, before they became bullies, when every man was someone to be placated, when only hope sustained them and they could count on nothing from the world but what could be charmed from it, that make them, if they survive their triumph, successful with women.”

— Evelyn Waugh

172. “A wonderfully congenial group who live by a unique set of social standards. According to their rules, any sin is acceptable provided it is carried off in good taste.”

— Evelyn Waugh

173. “The only thing that it is advisable to know in any language is the numerals; and even there, you can do a lot with the fingers.”

— Evelyn Waugh

174. “The better sort of Ishmaelites have been Christian for many centuries and will not publicly eat human flesh uncooked in Lent, without special and costly dispensation from their bishop.”

— Evelyn Waugh

175. “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.” This was the belief of Guy Crouchback in 1939 when he heard the news of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty. What follows is the story of his attempt to find his “place in that battle.”

— Evelyn Waugh

176. “There is practically no sense that is not violated every time we return from the country or the sea to Paris or London or New York.”

— Evelyn Waugh

177. “The Grace of God is in courtesy’;.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

180. “Most writers in the course of their careers become thick-skinned and learn to accept vituperation, which in any other profession would be unimaginably offensive, as a healthy counterpoise to unintelligent praise.”

— Evelyn Waugh

181. “I do not aspire to advise my sovereign in her choice of servants.”

— Evelyn Waugh

182. “Free as air; that’s what they say- “free as air”. Now they bring me my air in an iron barrel.”

— Evelyn Waugh

183. “It was as though Banquo had turned host.”

— Evelyn Waugh

184. “Above all the babble of her age and ours, she makes one blunt assertion. And there alone lies Hope.”

— Evelyn Waugh

185. “Do you know last year, when I thought I was going to have a child, I’d decided to have it brought up a Catholic? I hadn’t thought about religion before; I haven’t since; but just at that time, when I was was waiting for the birth, I thought, ‘That’s the one thing I can give her. It doesn’t seem to have done me much good, but my child shall have it.’ It was odd, wanting to give something one had lost oneself.”

— Evelyn Waugh

186. “Despite their promises at the last Election, the politicians had not yet changed the climate.”

— Evelyn Waugh

187. “But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.”

— Evelyn Waugh

188. “Virginia’s son was born on June 4th, the day on which all allied armies entered Rome.”

— Evelyn Waugh

189. “The tour bus was supposed to be here ten minutes ago. Would it be possible to give them a ring to check they’ve not forgotten us?”

— Evelyn Waugh

190. “She was daily surprised by the things he knew and the things he did not know; both, at the time, added to his attraction.”

— Evelyn Waugh

191. “The next four weeks of solitary confinement were among the happiest of Paul’s life... It was so exhilarating, he found, never to have to make any decision on any subject, to be wholly relieved from the smallest consideration of time, meas, or clothes, to have no anxiety ever about what kind of impression he was making; in fact, to be free.”

— Evelyn Waugh

192. “Thus strategists hesitate over the map, the few pins and lines of coloured chalk, contemplating a change in the pins and lines, a matter of inches, which outside the room, out of sight of the studious officers, may engulf the past, present and future in ruin or life. She was a symbol to herself then, lacking the life of both child and woman; victory and defeat were changes of pin and line; she knew nothing of war.”

— Evelyn Waugh

193. “It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.”

— Evelyn Waugh

194. “He was talking very excitedly to me,” said the Vicar, “about some apparatus for warming a church in Worthing and about the Apostolic Claims of the Church of Abyssinia. I confess I could not follow him clearly. He seems deeply interested in Church matters. Are you quite sure he is right in the head? I have noticed again and again since I have been in the Church that lay interest in ecclesiastical matters is often a prelude to insanity.”

— Evelyn Waugh

195. “My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret.”

— Evelyn Waugh

196. “I put the words down and push them a bit.”

— Evelyn Waugh

197. “I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St James’s Street in the first Autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime, the same words of hope.”

— Evelyn Waugh

198. “Beerbohm was a genius of the purest kind. He stands at the summit of his art.”

— Evelyn Waugh

199. “Every attendance at Mass leaves me without comfort or edification. I shall never, pray God, apostatize but church-going is now a bitter trial.”

— Evelyn Waugh

200. “Brenda descended the great staircase step by step through alternations of dusk and rainbow.”

— Evelyn Waugh