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 WAUGHAn artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.
More Evelyn Waugh Quotes
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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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It is a curious thing. That every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
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.
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When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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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To understand all is to forgive all.
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Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.
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Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
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Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
EVELYN WAUGH -
O God, make me good, but not yet.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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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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 -
If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.
EVELYN WAUGH -
One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
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Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
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I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.
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The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.
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The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.
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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.
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If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.
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I’m one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.
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Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.
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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