Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
EVELYN WAUGHOne forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
More Evelyn Waugh Quotes
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Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.
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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 can’t bare you when you’re not amusing.
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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.
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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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To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.
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Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
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Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.
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Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
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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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Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
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Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.
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To understand all is to forgive all.
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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.
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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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Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.
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I think it’s one of the kindest things you can do to the very wicked, to give them time to repent.
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Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
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I think there’s almost nothing I can’t excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.
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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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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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The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.
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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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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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Its a rather pleasant change when all your life you’ve had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.
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Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
EVELYN WAUGH