Evelyn Waugh (1903 – 1966)
English satirical novelist.
A copy of Dante's Purgatorio excited his especial disgust.
Your action, and your action alone, determines your worth.
Other nations use 'force'; we Britons alone use 'Might'.
You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs—except in England, of course.
And the only interest about him arises from the unusual series of events of which his shadow was witness.
"I have been here before," I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.
The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.
"We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors, do hereby proclaim. . ." Seth paused in his dictation and gazed out across the harbour where in the fresh breeze of early morning the last dhow was setting sail for the open sea. "Rats," he said; "stinking curs. They are all running away."
To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.
Lord Copper quite often gave banquets; it would be an understatement to say that no one enjoyed them more than the host, for no one else enjoyed them at all, while Lord Copper positively exulted in every minute.
"You see my adjutant made rather a silly mistake. He hadn't had much truck with boots before and the silly fellow thought they were extra rations. My men ate the whole bag of tricks last night."
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
O God, make me good, but not yet.
There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.
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.
So the two of them went to London by the early morning train. 'Let's surprise her,' said Nigel, but Cedric telephoned first, wryly remembering the story of the pedantic adulterer - 'My dear, it is I who am surprised; you are astounded.'
How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation. There is no candour in a story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable regularity."
"It is typical of Oxford," I said, "to start the new year in autumn."
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.