Evelyn Waugh
He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.Collection: Wisdom
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.Collection: Time
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.Collection: Art
Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.Collection: Alone
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.
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.
We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.
We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.
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.
Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.
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.
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.
It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.
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.
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.
What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?
In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.
If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.
I put the words down and push them a bit.
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.
I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.
Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.
My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.
Other nations use 'force'; we Britons alone use 'Might'.
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.
Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
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.
Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.Collection: Past
You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.Collection: Ideas
Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.Collection: Writing
The great charm in argument is really finding one's own opinions, not other people's.Collection: People
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.Collection: Ugly
If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all beCollection: Science
There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book.Collection: Book
... To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.Collection: Roots
Beer commercials are so patriotic: Made the American Way. What does that have to do with America? Is that what America stands for? Feeling sluggish and urinating frequently?Collection: Patriotic
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.Collection: Beautiful
The most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana Cigar.Collection: Blue
O God, make me good, but not yet.Collection: Brideshead Revisited
Properly understood, style is not a seductive decoration added to a functional structure; it is of the essence of a work of art. The necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance, and individuality; these three qualities combine to form a preservative which ensures the nearest approximation to permanence in the fugitive art of letters.Collection: Art
If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well.Collection: Funny
No one is ever holy without suffering.Collection: Suffering
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them...Collection: Funny