Quotes from Evelyn Waugh

Enclosing every thin man, there's a fat man demanding elbow-room.

One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.

O God, make me good, but not yet.

O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.

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.

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

I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason that he is anxious to conceal.

If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.

We can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales.

Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.

If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well.

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

'I will not stand for being called a woman in my own house' she said.

There is nothing to be gained by multiplying social distinctions indefinitely.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

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

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

If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be

Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly; the best you can hope for is to be a bore.

We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.

When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.

His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.

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

she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?