Quote

Evelyn Waugh: How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William? Sir William Beveridge: I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it. Waugh: I get mine spreading alarm and despondency and I get more satisfaction than you do.

Evelyn Waugh

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Evelyn Waugh
Age: 62 †
Born: 1903
Born: October 28
Died: 1966
Died: April 10
Autobiographer
Diarist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh
Place
William
Better
Main
Satisfaction
Waugh
Trying
Mines
Evelyn
Life
Mine
Despondency
World
Leave
Alarm
Pleasure
Spreading
Found
Alarms

More quotes by Evelyn Waugh

Image
It is typical of Oxford, I said, to start the new year in autumn.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
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.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
You don't remove the evil in a person by killing the person.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor [group think] of the age and not go flopping along. By doing this he helps us to question and reassess our past, present and future situations, our assumptions and our options.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision no harps no communal order but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
An artist must be a reactionary
Evelyn Waugh
Image
We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
Evelyn Waugh
Image
My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand.' 'I don't want to make it easier for you,' I said 'I hope your heart may break but I do understand.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them...
Evelyn Waugh
Image
The Welsh are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing. Sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
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
Image
He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
Medical science has oppressed us with a new huge burden of longevity. It is in that last undesired decade, when passion is cold, appetites feeble, curiosity dulled and experience has begotten cynicism, that accidia lies in wait as the final temptation to destruction.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.
Evelyn Waugh