Life & Wisdom Quote by Evelyn Waugh

Waugh’s joke lands because it flatters the reader’s sensibility while torching the whole enterprise of religious marketing. “Curious” is doing sly work: it pretends to be mild, even whimsical, while smuggling in a lethal premise - that creeds sell paradise the way advertisers sell resorts, with cheery brochures that don’t mention the clientele. The punchline isn’t that heaven sounds boring; it’s that the promised reward so often resembles a spiritual housing development designed for someone else’s idea of virtue, leisure, and company.

The barb about “civilized taste” is classic Waugh: an aristocratic sniff that’s also a trap. He’s mocking the bourgeois certainty that refinement is a moral category, yet he’s also using that snobbery as a diagnostic tool. If salvation requires you to enjoy what you currently find aesthetically or socially intolerable - the endless hymn-sing, the pious small talk, the saccharine niceness, the forced sameness - then the theology has failed a basic test of human psychology. Utopias collapse not just on policy but on ambiance.

Context matters: Waugh wrote from the fractures of the early 20th century, when mass politics, mass culture, and mass faith all promised total solutions. His Catholicism was real, but so was his allergy to sentimental piety and “improving” ideologies. The line skewers any creed that confuses holiness with homogeneity. Paradise becomes “uninhabitable” when it’s imagined as a reward for conformity rather than a transformation of desire itself.