Evelyn Waugh Quotations

I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.

At first it was impressive, but after half and hour deadly monotonous. It was like everything German - overdone.

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and the plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsud drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then - phut! vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.

The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!

Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.

Winston Churchill is always expecting rabbits to come out of an empty hat.

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

Civilization - and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe - has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance ... It is no longer possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis on which it rests ... Christianity ... is in greater need of combative strength than it has been for centuries.

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

Soon someone would say the fatal words, "Well, I think it’s time for me to go to bed.