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.

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

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

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.

People are either born hosts or born guests.

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

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.

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

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

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

Nobody ever died of laughter.

All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.

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.

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

Death cancels all engagements.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Admiration involves a glorious obliquity of vision.

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.

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

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.

The delicate balance between modesty and conceit is popularity.

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

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

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

To destroy is still the strongest instinct of our nature.

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

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.