I think there’s almost nothing I can’t excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.
EVELYN WAUGHHe had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.
More Evelyn Waugh Quotes
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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.
EVELYN WAUGH -
They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. 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 -
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 -
You don’t remove the evil in a person by killing the person.
EVELYN WAUGH -
I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.
EVELYN WAUGH -
O God, make me good, but not yet.
EVELYN WAUGH -
I put the words down and push them a bit.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Enclosing every thin man, there’s a fat man demanding elbow-room.
EVELYN WAUGH -
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them…
EVELYN WAUGH -
O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.
EVELYN WAUGH -
I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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 -
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 -
News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.
EVELYN WAUGH -
One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
EVELYN WAUGH -
What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.
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 -
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 -
I can’t bare you when you’re not amusing.
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 -
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 -
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 -
Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.
EVELYN WAUGH