Top 80 Nevil Shute Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Maybe we’ve been too silly to deserve a world like this.”

— Nevil Shute

2. “Some games are fun even when you lose. Even when you know you’re going to lose before you start. It’s fun just playing them.”

— Nevil Shute

3. “It’s no good going on living in the ashes of a dead happiness.”

— Nevil Shute

4. “It has been said that an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound; if that be so, we were certainly engineers.”

— Nevil Shute

5. “She lived in the dream world of unreality, or else she would not admit reality; he did not know. In any case, he loved her as she was. It might never be used, but it would give her pleasure to have it.”

— Nevil Shute

6. “Only by an act of treachery to those who believe in us can either of us escape.”

— Nevil Shute

7. “Everybody pays lip service to the safety of the aeroplane, but nobody is prepared to pay for it.”

— Nevil Shute

8. “You cannot argue stupidity, you just have to accept it patiently as one of those things.”

— Nevil Shute

9. “There’s no dignity, no decency, or health today for men that haven’t got a job. All other things depend on work today.”

— Nevil Shute

10. “If what they say is right we’re none of us going to have time to do all that we planned to do. But we can keep on doing it as long as we can.”

— Nevil Shute

11. “People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had, she said quietly, staring into the embers. they don’t know what it was like, not being in a camp.”

— Nevil Shute

12. “Men’ s souls are naturally inclined to covetousness; but if ye be kind towards women and fear to wrong tgem, God is well acquainted with what ye do.”

— Nevil Shute

13. “I’m glad we haven’t got newspapers now. It’s been much nicer without them.”

— Nevil Shute

14. “Round the next corner and in the next street Adventure lies in wait for you. Oh, who can tell what you may meet Round the next corner and in the next street! Could life be anything but sweet When all is hazardous and new? Round the next corner and in the next street Adventure lies in wait for you. That.”

— Nevil Shute

15. “Without work men are utterly undone.”

— Nevil Shute

16. “I want to drink hard liquor, as you call it, before lunch. I’ve got a mouth like the bottom of the parrot’s cage. You wouldn’t want me to throw a screaming fit in front of all your officers.”

— Nevil Shute

17. “When you and I are dead, and all the rest of us who served in the last war, in all the countries,” she said, “there’ll be a chance of world peace. Not till then.”

— Nevil Shute

18. “Differential equations won’t help you much in the design of aeroplanes – not yet, anyhow.”

— Nevil Shute

19. “Here they go cruising for a fortnight up in parts where everyone is dead of radiation, and all that they can catch is measles!”

— Nevil Shute

20. “I was at Geelong Grammar.” The Eton of Australia meant nothing to her.”

— Nevil Shute

21. “You can call a sunset by a filthy name, but you do not spoil its beauty, monsieur.”

— Nevil Shute

22. “This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.”

— Nevil Shute

23. “All those cities, all those fields and farms, with nobody, and nothing left alive. Just nothing there. I simply can’t take it in.”

— Nevil Shute

24. “If I have learned one thing in my 54 years, it is that it is very good for the character to engage in sports which put your life in danger from time to time. It breeds a saneness in dealing with day to day trivialities which probably cannot be got in any other way, and a habit of quick decisions.”

— Nevil Shute

25. “Mary looked at her gratefully. “Well, that’s what I think. I mean, I couldn’t bear to – to just stop doing things and do nothing. You might as well die now and get it over.” Moira nodded. “If what they say is right, we’re none of us going to have time to do all that we planned to do. But we can keep on doing it as long as we can.”

— Nevil Shute

26. “I didn’t wait to see her ship go off, because partings are stupid things and best got over quickly.”

— Nevil Shute

27. “Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it’s all over.”

— Nevil Shute

28. “The happily married man with a large family is the test pilot for me.”

— Nevil Shute

29. “You can only do a thing for the first time once, and that goes for falling in love.”

— Nevil Shute

30. “An American, a soldier of fortune by profession. Wherever there is trouble in the world the Dwights of all nations foregather. There are not very many of them, thirty or forty perhaps, and they are all supremely competent men because the others have been killed.”

— Nevil Shute

31. “I’d say the way to look at it is this. You took a lot of trouble answering letters from a stranger, and maybe some of them were rather stupid questions. I wouldn’t know. The fact is that you made a friend, and now this friend’s going to a little bit of trouble to help you. That’s fair enough. Look at it that way.”

— Nevil Shute

32. “We are not like that, we engineers. We are men of understanding and of education, on whom is laid responsibility that men may travel in these aeroplanes as safely as if they were sitting by the well in the cool of the evening.”

— Nevil Shute

33. “Half a thou too small,” he said. “The difference between Right and Wrong. Half a thou bigger, and it’ld be Right. As it is, it’s Wrong, and you can’t cheat about it.” He smiled again. “Too bad when God gives you the mind of an Inspector, isn’t it?”

— Nevil Shute

34. “He is a good man, and will climb up to the Six Blissful Seats. He has known sin and trouble and it has not made him bitter; he has known sorrow and it has not made him sad. In these last months that have been granted to him he is trying to do good, not.”

— Nevil Shute

35. “Finally he got up, feeling uncommonly well. It did not occur to him that this was because he had a job to do, for the first time in many months.”

— Nevil Shute

36. “She had known for some time that his wife and family were very real to him, more real by far than the half-life in a far corner of the world that had been forced upon him since the war.”

— Nevil Shute

37. “He was one of that great class of Englishmen who love their wives and trust them unquestioningly with their money and their honour, but are apt to hedge a little over their motor-cars.”

— Nevil Shute

38. “Many evils spring from power,” he said. “Even from the power to do good. All power corrupts, and the intention to do good has little influence on the corruption. Either my words will last after me and be believed by men, or else they won’t. Yet if one thing were required to kill them certainly, it is that my words should be spread after my death by the power of money. No teaching could survive a campaign of paid advertising.”

— Nevil Shute

39. “You don’t feel any different as you get older. Only, you can’t do so much.”

— Nevil Shute

40. “You did not die when you were drawing public assistance money, but you certainly did not remain alive.”

— Nevil Shute

41. “Everything had come good at last, after so many years. I had reached the happy ending of the story, and I was quietly, serenely happy. In the soft, velvety darkness I lay utterly at peace for I had finished with all heartaches, with all pains and worries; nothing could touch me now. I had finished the book but I could take it up and read it over and over again, and I would do so, secure in the knowledge of the happiness in the last chapter.”

— Nevil Shute

42. “In the quiet serenity of the night that did not seem very important; it was only important that she should shut up and not spoil his evening. “Now you get on and start her up, and shut up talking.” She opened her mouth to give as good as she got, but said nothing. What he had told her was incredible; and yet it was what she had secretly feared for some time.”

— Nevil Shute

43. “I have been asked sometimes what led me to the Persian Gulf, what instinct told me that I could build up a business there. It’s really perfectly simple. If you go to the hottest and most uncomfortable place on the map you’ll find there’s not a lot of competition;.”

— Nevil Shute

44. “Leave-takings are stupid things, and best forgotten about as quickly as possible.”

— Nevil Shute

45. “So let them pass, small people of no great significance, caught up and swept together like dead leaves in the great whirlwind of the war.”

— Nevil Shute

46. “Before she had been a year at Ford Janet came to look forward to her next pass with something close to apprehension; it was pitiful to see her mother ageing and be unable to help her, to see her father turning into just another poor old man.”

— Nevil Shute

47. “Professor O’Leary was Professor of Mediaeval Literature at Ann Arbor University in Michigan, just outside Detroit.”

— Nevil Shute

48. “Then the patience borne of seventy years of disappointments came to his aid;.”

— Nevil Shute

49. “The news did not trouble her particularly; all news was bad, like wage demands, strikes, or war, and the wise person paid no attention to it. What was important was that it was a bright, sunny day; her first narcissi were in bloom, and the daffodils behind them were already showing flower buds.”

— Nevil Shute

50. “I couldn’t bear to – to just stop doing things and do nothing. You might as well die now and get it over.”

— Nevil Shute