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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

Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
EVELYN WAUGH

Meaning Vulgar Word
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

Education Lose Yourself
Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.
EVELYN WAUGH

Action Alone Determination Worth Yourself
Once you start changing a name, you see, there’s no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.
EVELYN WAUGH

Better Change Name Reason See Sound Start Stop Yourself
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

Dignity Forest Myself Power Ruin Thinking
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

Character Food Soft Warm
Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
EVELYN WAUGH

Art Crime Design Desire Expression
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

Appearance Enough Heaven Human Invention Mindset
If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.
EVELYN WAUGH

Work Worth
What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.
EVELYN WAUGH

Exception See Woman Youth
The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.
EVELYN WAUGH

Argument Greatness Opinion People
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

Country Design Expectation Generosity Happiness Listening People Secret Talk
When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.
EVELYN WAUGH

Argument Limitation Ourselves
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.
EVELYN WAUGH

Bury Happiness Misery Myself Old Place Precious Remember Ugly
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

Active Age Comfortable Company Philosophy Young
Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
EVELYN WAUGH

Happiness Intense Shoes Word
I don’t believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn’t been told about it. It’s like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn’t been told it existed.
EVELYN WAUGH

Believe Existence Fall Love Marriage Myself People
Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
EVELYN WAUGH

Character Let Go Mischief Need Yourself
Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.
EVELYN WAUGH

Art Artist Design Strike Value
I can’t bare you when you’re not amusing.
EVELYN WAUGH

Amusement Myself Personality Yourself
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

Answer Desire Desperate Emotion Hate Identity Love Name Philosophy Yourself
I think it’s one of the kindest things you can do to the very wicked, to give them time to repent.
EVELYN WAUGH

Kind Myself Thinking Time Wickedness
All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.
EVELYN WAUGH

Happiness Myself Sleep Togetherness
After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can’t trust a person.
EVELYN WAUGH

Couple Love Person Relationship Trust Yourself
I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.
EVELYN WAUGH

Best Book Novel Travel Worst
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

Live Myself Popular Reading Truth Wrong
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

Feeling Heart Broken Herself Local Simplicity

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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