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 WAUGHI 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.
More Evelyn Waugh Quotes
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There’s only one great evil in the world today. Despair.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
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 -
One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
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 -
I’m quite deaf now; such a comfort.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.
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 think it’s one of the kindest things you can do to the very wicked, to give them time to repent.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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 -
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 -
What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.
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 -
O God, make me good, but not yet.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.
EVELYN WAUGH -
The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.
EVELYN WAUGH -
I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
EVELYN WAUGH -
If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.
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 -
To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.
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 -
I put the words down and push them a bit.
EVELYN WAUGH -
O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.
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 -
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