Quote

There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

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
Despair
Evil
Today
Great
World

More quotes by Evelyn Waugh

Image
... the understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
Of the many smells of Athens two seem to me the most characteristic - that of garlic, bold and deadly like acetylene gas. and that of dust, soft and warm and caressing like tweed.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. ... Or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won't quite despair of me in the end.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
Its theme-- the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters-- was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people. It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity. Their sons and daughters rarely mate with humankind except their own blood relations.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
To understand all is to forgive all.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
It is typical of Oxford, I said, to start the new year in autumn.
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
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
Image
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
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
Saints are simply men & women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.
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
Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
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
Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.' 'I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul.
Evelyn Waugh