Max Beerbohm Quotes

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

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

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'.

Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I may be old fashioned, but I am right.

It distresses me, this failure to keep pace with the leaders of thought, as they pass into oblivion.

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

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

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

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

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

Only the insane take themselves seriously.

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

Nobody ever died of laughter.

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.

Most women are not as young as they are painted.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Admiration involves a glorious obliquity of vision.

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.

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.

The one real goal of education is to leave a person asking questions.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

To destroy is still the strongest instinct of our nature.

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

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

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.