Top 300 Evelyn Waugh Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “An artist must be a reactionary.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

158. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

160. “Sebastian contra mundum.”

— Evelyn Waugh

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

174. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

177. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

186. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

188. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

191. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

193. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

196. “Frankly,” said the Doctor, “I am at a loss to understand my own emotions. I can think of no entertainment that fills me with greater detestation than a display of competitive athletics, none – except possibly folk dancing.”

— Evelyn Waugh

197. “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

198. “He delighted in writing, in the joinery and embellishment of his sentences, in the consciousness of high rare virtue when every word had been used in its purest and most precise sense, in the kitten games of syntax and rhetoric. Words could do anything except generate their own meaning.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh