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 WAUGHYour actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.
More Evelyn Waugh Quotes
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Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
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Enclosing every thin man, there’s a fat man demanding elbow-room.
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We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them…
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It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.
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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.
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Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
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My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.
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An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.
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We possess nothing certainly except the past.
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To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Once you start changing a name, you see, there’s no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.
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Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
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I’m quite deaf now; such a comfort.
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I think there’s almost nothing I can’t excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.
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For in that city -New York; there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
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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.
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Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
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I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.
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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.
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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.
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It is a curious thing. That every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
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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.
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News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.
EVELYN WAUGH