Max Beerbohm quotes
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“It distresses me, this failure to keep pace with the leaders of thought, as they pass into oblivion.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“Some people are born to lift heavy weights, some are born to juggle golden balls.”
-- Max BeerbohmSource : "The Comparable Max" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. August 3, 2015.
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“To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.”
-- Max BeerbohmSource : Max Beerbohm (2015). “The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm”, p.71, New York Review of Books
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“People are either born hosts or born guests.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
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“No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.”
-- Max BeerbohmSource : Max Beerbohm (2006). “And Even Now”, p.70, 1st World Publishing
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“Only the insane take themselves seriously.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“There is much to be said for failure. It is much more interesting than success.”
-- Max BeerbohmSource : "The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm".
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“Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.”
-- Max BeerbohmSource : Saturday Review, 5 Nov. 1904 See Maugham 11
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“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 BeerbohmSource : Zuleika Dobson (1911) ch. 9
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“All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.”
-- Max BeerbohmSource : Max Beerbohm (2006). “And Even Now”, p.91, 1st World Publishing
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“Pessimism does win us great happy moments.”
-- Max BeerbohmSource : Max Beerbohm (2006). “And Even Now”, p.88, 1st World Publishing
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“Women who love the same man have a kind of bitter freemasonry.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“The one real goal of education is to leave a person asking questions.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
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“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 -
“History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
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“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.”
-- Max BeerbohmSource : Max Beerbohm (2015). “The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm”, p.119, New York Review of Books
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“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
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“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“I believe the twenty-four hour day has come to stay.”
-- Max BeerbohmSource : Sir Max Beerbohm (1922). “Works”
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“To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature.”
-- Max BeerbohmSource : "Yet Again".
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“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 -
“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 -
“The lower one's vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
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“A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“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 -
“Heroes are very human, most of them; very easily touched by praise.”
-- Max BeerbohmSource : Max Beerbohm (2015). “The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm”, p.75, New York Review of Books
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“A man's work is rather the needful supplement to himself than the outcome of it.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
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“People seem to think there is something inherently noble and virtuous in the desire to go for a walk.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
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“Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“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 -
“I prefer that laughter shall take me unawares. Only so can it master and dissolve me.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“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.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
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“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.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“But to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“Men of genius are not quick judges of character.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
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“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 -
“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.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“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 -
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“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.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“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.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“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 -
“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 -
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“The critic who justly admires all kinds of things simultaneously cannot love any one of them.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“Admiration involves a glorious obliquity of vision.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“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 -
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“People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“No Roman ever was able to say, 'I dined last night with the Borgias'.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“Most women are not as young as they are painted.”
-- Max BeerbohmSource : Yellow Book (1894) vol. 1, p. 67
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“I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
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“Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently. Things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“The delicate balance between modesty and conceit is popularity.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
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“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 -
“We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of Americans.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“One might well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.”
-- Max BeerbohmSource : Max Beerbohm (2010). “Zuleika Dobson: An Oxford Love Story”, p.51, The Floating Press
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“It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“Humility is a virtue, and it is a virtue innate in guests.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“A hundred eyes were fixed on her, and half as many hearts lost to her.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“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 -
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“To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“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 -
“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 -
“Sometimes I feel that I am a natural born genius in a field of human endeavor that hasn't been invented yet”
-- Max Beerbohm -
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“"After all," as a pretty girl once said to me, "women are a sex by themselves, so to speak."”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“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.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends....”
-- Max BeerbohmSource : "Lytton Strachey". Book by Max Beerbohm, Cambridge University Press, 2014.
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“Beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied....”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“The hospitable instinct is not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism mixed up with it.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“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 -
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“Great men are but life-sized. Most of them, indeed, are rather short.”
-- Max BeerbohmSource : Max Beerbohm (2006). “And Even Now”, p.93, 1st World Publishing
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“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 -
“For people who like that kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they like.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
“You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.”
-- Max Beerbohm -
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“Of all the objects of hatred, a woman once loved is the most hateful.”
-- Max Beerbohm
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