Max Beerbohm Quotations

To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.

People are either born hosts or born guests.

No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.

Some people are born to lift heavy weights, some are born to juggle golden balls.

I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature.

When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.

Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best

All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.

Most women are not as young as they are painted.

To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people.

It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality.

We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of Americans.

The delicate balance between modesty and conceit is popularity.

I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.

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.

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.

One might well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.

Of all the objects of hatred, a woman once loved is the most hateful.

A hundred eyes were fixed on her, and half as many hearts lost to her.

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

There is much to be said for failure. It is much more interesting than success.

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.

People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table.

To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme type of all that a host and hostess should not be.

Humility is a virtue, and it is a virtue innate in guests.

No Roman ever was able to say, 'I dined last night with the Borgias'.

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

You will find my last words in the blue folder.

Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently. Things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth.

To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.

Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.

You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.

She was one of those people who said ''I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.''

Men of genius are so few that they ought to atone for their fewness by being at any rate ubiquitous.

. . . but beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied.

I looked out for what the metropolitan reviewers would have to say. They seemed to fall into two classes: those who had little to say and those who had nothing.

There is much to be said for failure. It is more interesting than success.

Have you ever noticed there is never any third act to a nightmare? They bring you to a climax of terror and then leave you there.

There is always something rather absurd about the past

He cannot see beyond his own nose. Even the fingers he outstretches from it to the world are (as I shall suggest) often invisible to him.

I was a modest, good-humored boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

It is doubtful whether the people of southern England have even yet realized how much introspection there is going on all the time in the Five Towns.

Vulgarity has its uses. Vulgarity often cuts ice which refinement scrapes at vainly.

What were they going to do with the Grail when they found it, Mr Rossetti?

O the disgrace of it! - / The scandal, the incredible come-down!

Americans have a perfect right to exist. But he did often find himself wishing Mr. Rhodes had not enabled them to exercise that right at Oxford.

A swear-word in a rustic slum / A simple swear-word is to some, / To Masefield something more.

Pessimism does win us great happy moments.

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.

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.

Strange when you come to think of it, that of all countless folk who have lived on this planet, not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Great men are but life-sized. Most of them, indeed, are rather short.

What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead - so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

The hospitable instinct is not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism mixed up with it.

Beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied....

The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends....

Not that I had any special reason for hating school. Strange as it may seem to my readers, I was not unpopular there. I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.

"After all," as a pretty girl once said to me, "women are a sex by themselves, so to speak."

Sometimes I feel that I am a natural born genius in a field of human endeavor that hasn't been invented yet

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.

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.

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.

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.

For people who like that kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they like.

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.

Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie.

Admiration involves a glorious obliquity of vision.

But to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia.

The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play.

True dandyism is the result of an artistic temperament working upon a fine body within the wide limits of fashion.

Women who love the same man have a kind of bitter freemasonry.

Men of genius are not quick judges of character.

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.

For a young man, sleep is a sure solvent of distress. There whirls not for him in the night any so hideous phantasmagoria as will not become, in the clarity of the next morning, a spruce procession for him to lead. Brief the vague horror of his awakening; memory sweeps back to him, and he sees nothing dreadful after all. "Why not?" is the sun's bright message to him, and "Why not indeed?" his answer.

I believe the twenty-four hour day has come to stay.

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.

Of course we all know that Morris was a wonderful all-round man, but the act of walking round him has always tired me.

By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.

I may be old fashioned, but I am right.

Every kind of writing is hypocritical.

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.

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.

In every human being one or the other of these two instincts is predominant: the active or positive instinct to offer hospitality, the negative or passive instinct to accept it. And either of these instincts is so significant of character that one might as well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.

Few, as I have said, are the humorists who can induce this state. To master and dissolve us, to give us the joy of being worn down and tired out with laughter, is a success to be won by no man save in virtue of a rare staying-power. Laughter becomes extreme only if it be consecutive. There must be no pauses for recovery. Touch-and-go humour, however happy, is not enough. The jester must be able to grapple his theme and hang on to it, twisting it this way and that, and making it yield magically all manner of strange and precious things.

Has the gift of laughter been withdrawn from me? I protest that I do still, at the age of forty-seven, laugh often and loud and long. But not, I believe, so long and loud and often as in my less smiling youth. And I am proud, nowadays, of laughing, and grateful to any one who makes me laugh. That is a bad sign. I no longer take laughter as a matter of course.

There is laughter that goes so far as to lose all touch with its motive, and to exist only, grossly, in itself. This is laughter at its best. A man to whom such laughter has often been granted may happen to die in a work-house. No matter. I will not admit that he has failed in life. Another man, who has never laughed thus, may be buried in Westminster Abbey, leaving more than a million pounds overhead. What then? I regard him as a failure.

The critic who justly admires all kinds of things simultaneously cannot love any one of them.

A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.

Fate weaves the darkness, which is perhaps why she weaves so badly.

Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused.

Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.

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.

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.

People seem to think there is something inherently noble and virtuous in the desire to go for a walk.

A man's work is rather the needful supplement to himself than the outcome of it.