Quotes By Evelyn Waugh

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.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

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.

We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.

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.

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.

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.

He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

I put the words down and push them a bit.

My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.

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.

Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.

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.

We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.

You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.

What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?

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.

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.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

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.