Top 300 Evelyn Waugh Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 7

151. “Sebastian contra mundum.”

— Evelyn Waugh

152. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

154. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

156. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

159. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

166. “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

167. “Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is 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. “An artist must be a reactionary.”

— Evelyn Waugh

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

176. “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

177. “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

178. “I do not believe the expenditure of $2.50 for a book entitles the purchaser to the personal friendship of the author.”

— Evelyn Waugh

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

184. “I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that’s like three people getting together to have a baby.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

186. “Ought we to be drunk every night?” Sebastian asked one morning. “Yes, I think so.” “I think so too.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

188. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

190. “It was during that term that I began to realise that Sebastian was a drunkard in quite a different sense to myself. I got drunk often, but through an excess of high spirits, in the love of the moment, and the wish to prolong and enchant it; Sebastian drank to escape.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

192. “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

193. “I distinctly remember last Christmas seeing you together and thinking how happy you looked, and wondering why. You’ll find it very disturbing, you know, starting off again. How old are you – thirty-four? That’s no age to be starting.”

— Evelyn Waugh

194. “The problem of architecture as I see it is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of the form.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

196. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

199. “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

200. “I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.”

— Evelyn Waugh