Max Beerbohm Quotes

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

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

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

When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

People are either born hosts or born guests.

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

Only the insane take themselves seriously.

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

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

Heroes are very human, most of them; very easily touched by praise.

Nobody ever died of laughter.

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

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

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

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

Death cancels all engagements.

All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

The lower one's vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art.

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

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.

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.

Admiration involves a glorious obliquity of vision.

The delicate balance between modesty and conceit is popularity.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.