There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book.
EVELYN WAUGHThe great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.
More Evelyn Waugh Quotes
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To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.
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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.
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The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.
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There’s only one great evil in the world today. Despair.
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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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Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.
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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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Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.
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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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He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
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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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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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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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O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.
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Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
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A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.
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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.
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News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.
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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.
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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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Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
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All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.
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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.
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I’m one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.
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The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it. Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself.
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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