Top 93 Max Beerbohm Quotes
#1. I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.
Max Beerbohm
#2. There is in the human race some dark spirit of recalcitrance, always pulling us in the direction contrary to that in which we are reasonably expected to go.
Max Beerbohm
#3. Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused.
Max Beerbohm
#4. All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.
Max Beerbohm
#5. To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.
Max Beerbohm
#6. The critic who justly admires all kinds of things simultaneously cannot love any one of them.
Max Beerbohm
#8. For people who like that kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they like.
Max Beerbohm
#9. But to die of laughter
this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia.
Max Beerbohm
#10. As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality, he is immortal.
Max Beerbohm
#11. When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.
Max Beerbohm
#12. It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality.
Max Beerbohm
#13. I am a Tory anarchist. I should like everyone to go about doing just as he pleased - short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.
Max Beerbohm
#14. Great men are but life-sized. Most of them, indeed, are rather short.
Max Beerbohm
#15. The unforgettable thing in his life is usually not a thing he has done or left undone, but a thing done to him - some insolence or cruelty for which he could not, or did not, avenge himself.
Max Beerbohm
#16. Humility is a virtue, and it is a virtue innate in guests.
Max Beerbohm
#17. "After all," as a pretty girl once said to me, "women are a sex by themselves, so to speak."
Max Beerbohm
#18. There is much to be said for failure. It is much more interesting than success.
Max Beerbohm
#19. A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.
Max Beerbohm
#20. Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.
Max Beerbohm
#21. One is taught to refrain from irony, because mankind does tend to take it literally. In the hearing of the gods, who hear all, it is conversely unsage to make a simple and direct statement. So what is one to do? The dilema needs a whole volume to itself.
Max Beerbohm
#22. I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
Max Beerbohm
#23. To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.
Max Beerbohm
#24. A man's work is rather the needful supplement to himself than the outcome of it.
Max Beerbohm
#25. Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.
Max Beerbohm
#26. Improvisation is the essence of good talk. Heaven defend us from the talker who doles out things prepared for us; but let heaven not less defend us from the beautiful spontaneous writer who puts his trust in the inspiration of the moment.
Max Beerbohm
#27. Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.
Max Beerbohm
#28. By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.
Max Beerbohm
#29. I believe the twenty-four hour day has come to stay.
Max Beerbohm
#30. True dandyism is the result of an artistic temperament working upon a fine body within the wide limits of fashion.
Max Beerbohm
#31. Of course we all know that Morris was a wonderful all-round man, but the act of walking round him has always tired me.
Max Beerbohm
#32. Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently. Things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth.
Max Beerbohm
#34. From those pedestals which intersperse the railing of the Sheldonian, the high grim busts of the Roman Emperors stared down at the fair stranger in the equipage. Zuleika returned their stare with but a casual glance. The inanimate had little charm for her.
Max Beerbohm
#35. The most perfect caricature is that which, on a small surface, with the simplest means, most accurately exaggerates, to the highest point, the peculiarities of a human being, at his most characteristic moment in the most beautiful manner.
Max Beerbohm
#36. The loveliest face in all the world will not please you if you see it suddenly eye to eye, at a distance of half an inch from your own.
Max Beerbohm
#37. If a man carry his sense of proportion far enough, lo! he is back at the point from which he started. He knows that eternity, as conceived by him, is but an instant in eternity, and infinity but a speck in infinity.
Max Beerbohm
#38. To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people.
Max Beerbohm
#39. The delicate balance between modesty and conceit is popularity.
Max Beerbohm
#40. I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.
Max Beerbohm
#41. The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.
Max Beerbohm
#42. Reverence is a good thing, and part of its value is that the more we revere a man, the more sharply are we struck by anything in him (and there is always much) that is incongruous with his greatness.
Max Beerbohm
#43. People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table.
Max Beerbohm
#44. It is a fact that not once in all my life have I gone out for a walk. I have been taken out for walks; but that is another matter.
Max Beerbohm
#45. He was too much concerned with his own perfection ever to think of admiring any one else.
Max Beerbohm
#46. The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.
Max Beerbohm
#48. It is so much easier to covet what one hasn't than to revel in what one has. Also, it is so much easier to be enthusiastic about what exists than about what doesn't.
Max Beerbohm
#49. It is a part of English hypocrisy or English reserve, that whilst we are fluent enough in grumbling about small inconveniences, we insist on making light of any great difficulties or grief's that may beset us.
Max Beerbohm
#50. People seem to think there is something inherently noble and virtuous in the desire to go for a walk.
Max Beerbohm
#51. It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.
Max Beerbohm
#52. Only the insane take themselves seriously.
Max Beerbohm
#53. Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.
Max Beerbohm
#55. The one real goal of education is to leave a person asking questions.
Max Beerbohm
#56. The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends ...
Max Beerbohm
#57. Have you noticed ... there is never any third act in a nightmare? They bring you to a climax of terror and then leave you there. They are the work of poor dramatists.
Max Beerbohm
#58. No Roman ever was able to say, 'I dined last night with the Borgias'.
Max Beerbohm
#59. Heroes are very human, most of them; very easily touched by praise.
Max Beerbohm
#60. You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.
Max Beerbohm
#61. There is much virtue in a window. It is to a human being as a frame is to a painting, as a proscenium to a play, as 'form' to literature. It strongly defines its content.
Max Beerbohm
#62. It distresses me, this failure to keep pace with the leaders of thought, as they pass into oblivion.
Max Beerbohm
#64. To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature.
Max Beerbohm
#65. Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.
Max Beerbohm
#66. What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead - so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century
Max Beerbohm
#67. Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie.
Max Beerbohm
#68. Admiration involves a glorious obliquity of vision.
Max Beerbohm
#69. Sometimes I feel that I am a natural born genius in a field of human endeavor that hasn't been invented yet
Max Beerbohm
#70. The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play.
Max Beerbohm
#71. A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.
Max Beerbohm
#72. Some people are born to lift heavy weights,
some are born to juggle golden balls.
Max Beerbohm
#73. History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.
[1880]
Max Beerbohm
#74. The hospitable instinct is not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism mixed up with it.
Max Beerbohm
#75. People are either born hosts or born guests.
Max Beerbohm
#76. The lower one's vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art.
Max Beerbohm
#77. No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.
Max Beerbohm
#78. Mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.
Max Beerbohm
#79. You will find my last words in the blue folder.
Max Beerbohm
#80. Explain yourself!" he commanded.
"Isn't that rather much for a man to ask of a woman?"
"I don't know. I have no experience of women. In the abstract, it seems to me that every man has a
right to some explanation from the woman who has ruined his life." (page 90)
Max Beerbohm
#81. Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.
Max Beerbohm
#82. I could no more marry a man about whom I could not make a fool of myself than I could marry one who made a fool of himself about me. Else had I long ceased to be a spinster.
Max Beerbohm
#83. Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge.
Max Beerbohm
#84. The literary gift is a mere accident - is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as it is denied to strenuous sages.
Max Beerbohm
#85. Men prominent in life are mostly hard to converse with. They lack small-talk, and at the same time one doesn't like to confront them with their own great themes.
Max Beerbohm
#86. History,' it has been said, 'does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.
Max Beerbohm
#87. A hundred eyes were fixed on her, and half as many hearts lost to her.
Max Beerbohm
#88. Beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied ...
Max Beerbohm
#89. Most women are not as young as they are painted.
Max Beerbohm
#90. To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme type of all that a host and hostess should not be.
Max Beerbohm
#91. We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of Americans.
Max Beerbohm
#92. I utilise all my spare moments. I've read twenty-seven of the Hundred Best Books. I collect ferns.
Max Beerbohm
#93. Of all the objects of hatred, a woman once loved is the most hateful.
Max Beerbohm
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