“His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.”

—  Evelyn Waugh

As quoted in LIFE magazine (8 April 1946)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and …" by Evelyn Waugh?
Evelyn Waugh photo
Evelyn Waugh 123
British writer 1903–1966

Related quotes

Vladimir Lenin photo
Fyodor Dostoyevsky photo

“A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

Variant translations:
Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea — he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility… Do get up from your knees and sit down, I beg you, these posturings are false, too.
Part I, Book I: A Nice Little Family, Ch. 2 : The Old Buffoon; as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, p. 44
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

Pierre Hadot photo

“Only he who is capable of a genuine encounter with the other is capable of an authentic encounter with himself”

Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) French historian and philosopher

trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 91
La Philosophie comme manière de vivre (2001)
Context: Only he who is capable of a genuine encounter with the other is capable of an authentic encounter with himself, and the converse is equally true…From this perspective, every spiritual exercise is a dialogue, insofar as it is an exercise of authentic presence, to oneself and to others.

Virginia Woolf photo

“anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.”

Variant: But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
Source: Jacob's Room

Dante Gabriel Rossetti photo
John Calvin photo
Ali Al-Wardi photo
Samuel Johnson photo

“He was so generally civil that nobody thanked him for it.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

1777
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Life of Johnson (Boswell)

“He who thanks but with the lips, thanks but in part; the full, the true thanksgiving comes from the heart.”

John Augustus Shedd (1859) writer

Salt from My Attic (1928), The Mosher Press, Portland, Maine; cited in The Yale Book of Quotations (2006) ed. Fred R. Shapiro, p. 705; there are numerous variants of this expression.

Related topics