This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Julia used to say, 'Poor Sebastian. It's something chemical in him.' That was the cant phrase of the time, derived from heaven knows what misconception of popular science. 'There's something chemical between them' was used to explain the overmastering hate or love of any two people. It was the old concept of determinism in a new form. I do not believe there was anything chemical in my friend.
Life | Life | Principles |
The will is what matters - as long as you have that, you are safe.
If there is a symbol of our age, perhaps it is something that every factory worker does each day of their working lives -- I refer to clocking in. (Very soon probably they won't even have to do that; the clock will itself observe them by radar.) In the ancient world when a person entered a temple, each made a votive offering to a god or a goddess at the door. As twentieth century people file into their shrines, they obediently pay their due to the god that regulates their lives -- the clock. It is the clock that measures us, that silent witness that keeps our going in and our coming out and relentlessly records our every movement. That is where all our organization and machinery to free us from time, to save us time, has brought us. Never before have we had such control over things, and never before have we been so enslaved by them. And of nothing is this more true than of time.
Better | Circumstances | Consideration | Desire | Gentleness | Life | Life | Strength | Will |
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
It's a rather pleasant change when all your life you've had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
It's the seed of life we carry about with us like our skeletons, each one of us unconsciously pregnant with desirable villa residences. There's no escape. As individuals we simply do not exist. We are just potential home builders, beavers, and ants. How do we come into being? What is birth? (Part One, Chapter XII)
Most of our conflicts and difficulties come from trying to deal with the spiritual and practical aspects of our life separately instead of realizing them as parts of one whole. If our practical life is centered on our own interests, cluttered up by possessions, distracted by ambitions, passions, wants and worries, beset by a sense of our own rights and importance, or anxieties for our own future, or longings for our own success, we need not expect that our spiritual life will be a contrast to all this. The soul's house is not built on such a convenient plan; there are few soundproof partitions in it. Only when the conviction - not merely the idea - that the demand of the Spirit, however inconvenient, rules the whole of it, will those objectionable noises die down which have a way of penetrating into the nicely furnished little oratory and drowning all the quieter voices by their din.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
Those who complain that they make no progress in the life of prayer because they cannot meditate should examine, not their capacity for meditation, but their capacity for suffering and love. For there is a hard and costly element, a deep seriousness, a crucial choice, in all genuine religion.
Dependence | God | Language | Life | Life | Little | Religion | Universe | God |
The offertory is the first essential action of the Liturgy, because in it we make the costly and solemn oblation, under tokens, of our very selves and all our substance; that they may be transformed, quickened, and devoted to the interests of God.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
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, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
The next four weeks of solitary confinement were among the happiest of Paul's life...It was so exhilarating, he found, never to have to make any decision on any subject, to be wholly relieved from the smallest consideration of time, meas, or clothes, to have no anxiety ever about what kind of impression he was making; in fact, to be free.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance.
Absurd | Distinction | Effort | Excitement | Growth | Ideas | Inevitable | Life | Life | Men | Organic | People | Right | Think |