110+ Evelyn Waugh Quotes (Satirical, Witty And Acerbic)

Evelyn Waugh was an English author and satirist, best known for his novel Brideshead Revisited. He was born in 1903 and wrote many novels, short stories and travel books. He is considered one of the great modernists of the 20th century, and his works are still widely read today.

Top 10 Evelyn Waugh Quotes

1. Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
2. I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.
3. One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
4. I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets; I shall live long.
5. 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.
6. He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
7. Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.
8. An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.
9. ... To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.
10. Beer commercials are so patriotic: Made the American Way. What does that have to do with America? Is that what America stands for? Feeling sluggish and urinating frequently?

Evelyn Waugh Short Quotes

• After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.
• Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
• We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for our ability to amuse them.
• One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric.
• Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
• Yes, cider and tinned salmon are the staple diet of the agricultural classes.
• It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.
• Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
• We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.
• O God, make me good, but not yet.

Evelyn Waugh Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole. — Evelyn Waugh

Properly understood, style is not a seductive decoration added to a functional structure; it is of the essence of a work of art. The necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance, and individuality; these three qualities combine to form a preservative which ensures the nearest approximation to permanence in the fugitive art of letters. — Evelyn Waugh

The most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana Cigar. — Evelyn Waugh

I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience. — Evelyn Waugh

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city. — Evelyn Waugh

Beware of writing to me. I always answer ... My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing letters. If someone thanked him for a wedding present, he thanked them for thanking him and there was no end to the exchange but death. — Evelyn Waugh

There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief. — Evelyn Waugh

I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. ... Or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won't quite despair of me in the end. — Evelyn Waugh

It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste. — Evelyn Waugh

The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it. Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself. — Evelyn Waugh

Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher — Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh: How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William? Sir William Beveridge: I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it. Waugh: I get mine spreading alarm and despondency and I get more satisfaction than you do. — Evelyn Waugh

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it. — Evelyn Waugh

We possess nothing certainly except the past — Evelyn Waugh

Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything. — Evelyn Waugh

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography. — Evelyn Waugh

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish. — Evelyn Waugh

Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them. — Evelyn Waugh

O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin. — Evelyn Waugh

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. — Evelyn Waugh

We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school. — Evelyn Waugh

I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners. — Evelyn Waugh

Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic. — Evelyn Waugh

For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy. — Evelyn Waugh

If it could only be like this always - always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper. — Evelyn Waugh

My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally. — Evelyn Waugh

I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits. — Evelyn Waugh

Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm? — Evelyn Waugh

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

We are American at puberty. We die French. — Evelyn Waugh

What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen. — Evelyn Waugh

I'm one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation. — Evelyn Waugh

I think there's almost nothing I can't excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic. — Evelyn Waugh

Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity. — Evelyn Waugh

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless. — Evelyn Waugh

If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be. — Evelyn Waugh

A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions , but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline. — Evelyn Waugh

Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom. — Evelyn Waugh

No one is ever holy without suffering. — Evelyn Waugh

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day. — Evelyn Waugh

If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world. — Evelyn Waugh

You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course. — Evelyn Waugh

There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book. — Evelyn Waugh

That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down. — Evelyn Waugh

I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep. — Evelyn Waugh

Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases. — Evelyn Waugh

If politicians and scientist were lazier, how much happier we should all be. — Evelyn Waugh

Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in. — Evelyn Waugh

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 pretends it's God and hate that. — Evelyn Waugh

We can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales. — Evelyn Waugh

If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference. — Evelyn Waugh

... the understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited. — Evelyn Waugh

If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside. — Evelyn Waugh

Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying. — Evelyn Waugh

He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it [...] — Evelyn Waugh

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are. — Evelyn Waugh

Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.' 'I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul. — Evelyn Waugh

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. — Evelyn Waugh

The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! — Evelyn Waugh

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

Saints are simply men and women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God. — Evelyn Waugh

I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. — Evelyn Waugh

Beavers bred in captivity, inhabiting a concrete pool, will, if given the timber, fatuously go through all the motions of damming an ancestral stream. — Evelyn Waugh

That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty. — Evelyn Waugh

'I don't believe you've changed at all, Charles.' 'No, I'm afraid not.' 'D'you want to change?' 'It's the only evidence of life.' — Evelyn Waugh

Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom. — Evelyn Waugh

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed. — Evelyn Waugh

Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now. — Evelyn Waugh

Of children as of procreation -- the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable — Evelyn Waugh

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. — Evelyn Waugh

I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world. — Evelyn Waugh

His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death. — Evelyn Waugh

She had heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and was furious that she had not been asked. — Evelyn Waugh

Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic. — Evelyn Waugh

The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness! — Evelyn Waugh

The worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him. Julia to Charles — Evelyn Waugh

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

Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad. — Evelyn Waugh

...she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, "Surely I was made for some other purpose than this? — Evelyn Waugh

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead. — Evelyn Waugh

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor [group think] of the age and not go flopping along. By doing this he helps us to question and reassess our past, present and future situations, our assumptions and our options. — Evelyn Waugh

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past. — Evelyn Waugh

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

You spend the first term at Oxford meeting interesting and exciting people and the rest of your time there avoiding them — Evelyn Waugh

The audiences certainly have declined. If I go to the theatre now I find people come there to eat and smoke and talk to one another. And look like scarecrows. — Evelyn Waugh

What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen? — Evelyn Waugh

Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in "Old Maid"; the player who is finally left with it has lost. — Evelyn Waugh

Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified. — Evelyn Waugh

It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste. — Evelyn Waugh

Life Lessons by Evelyn Waugh

1. Evelyn Waugh teaches us to strive for excellence and to never give up in the face of adversity. He also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a sense of humor, even in the darkest of times. Lastly, he reminds us to be open to change and to always look for the silver lining in any situation.