Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Evelyn Waugh (British Novelist, Satirist)

Evelyn Waugh (1903–66,) fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh, was a British novelist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer. Known for quick and cruel wit, he was considered the most brilliant satirical novelist and one of the most excellent prose stylists of his day.

Born in Hampstead, London, Waugh was educated at Lancing and Hertford College-Oxford. He established his reputation with Decline and Fall (1928.) Vile Bodies (1930,) A Handful of Dust (1934,) and Put Out More Flags (1942) reflect inter-war British upper-class life.

Waugh also wrote accounts of an expedition through Africa (Remote People, 1931,) a journey through South America (Ninety-Two Days, 1934,) and Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia (Waugh in Abyssinia, 1936.)

Waugh’s works were profoundly influenced by his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930. His magnum opus Brideshead Revisited (1945) explores the imbalance of class in a friendship. Among his other major works are The Loved One (1948) and the Sword of Honour trilogy—Men at Arms (1952,) Officers and Gentlemen (1955,) and Unconditional Surrender (1961.)

In 1964, Waugh published A Little Learning, intended as the first of several volumes of an autobiography that was never completed.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works 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.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Heaven

Change is the only evidence of life.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Change

In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Quotations

Other nations use “force”; we Britons alone use “Might.”
—Evelyn Waugh

If we can’t stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Censorship

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.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: News

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Art, Arts, Artists

Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Prison

It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Paradise

He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Gift

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.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Prayer

If, for instance, they have heard something from the postman, they attribute it to “a semi-official statement”; if they have fallen into conversation with a stranger at a bar, they can conscientiously describe him as “a source that has hitherto proved unimpeachable.” It is only when the journalist is reporting a whim of his own, and one to which he attaches minor importance, that he defines it as the opinion of “well-informed circles.”
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Journalism

Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Manners

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Punctuality, Boredom

That’s the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: School, Education

Saints are simply men and women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Saints

One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Words

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for our ability to amuse them.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Friendship, Friends

One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Dreams

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Sex

What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Youth

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Criminals, Crime

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.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Christianity

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Autobiography, Legacy, Curiosity, Biography

His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Manners, Courtesy

If politicians and scientist were lazier, how much happier we should all be.
—Evelyn Waugh
Topics: Science, Scientists

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