Quotes by Evelyn Waugh

• 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.
• Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
• What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?
• You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.
• We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.
• We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.
• There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.
• There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.
• The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.
• When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.
• We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.
• It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
• Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.
• Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
• Other nations use 'force'; we Britons alone use 'Might'.
• One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
• Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.
• News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.
• 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.
• Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
• Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.
• Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
• My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.
• Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.
• I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep.
• All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.
• Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
• Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
• I put the words down and push them a bit.
• I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.
• If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.
• In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.
• He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
• 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.
• Wisdom is knowing when to speak your truth, and humor is knowing when to grin and bear it.
• Life is not a destination, but rather a long, chatty detour filled with snacks and entertaining roadside attractions.