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

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.
- Evelyn Waugh Quote

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

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.
- Evelyn Waugh Quote

I put the words down and push them a bit.
- Evelyn Waugh Quote

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 Quote

Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
- Evelyn Waugh Quote

It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
- Evelyn Waugh Quote

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.
- Evelyn Waugh Quote

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 Quote

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

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

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 Quote

Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.
- Evelyn Waugh Quote

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 Quote

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.
- Evelyn Waugh Quote

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.
- Evelyn Waugh Quote

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

We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.
- Evelyn Waugh Quote

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