Max Beerbohm Quotes
Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.
To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme type of all that a host and hostess should not be.
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.
Sometimes I feel that I am a natural born genius in a field of human endeavor that hasn't been invented yet
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.
The hospitable instinct is not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism mixed up with it.
What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead - so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century
She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.
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.
Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie.
By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.
The critic who justly admires all kinds of things simultaneously cannot love any one of them.
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.
Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.
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.
People seem to think there is something inherently noble and virtuous in the desire to go for a walk.
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.
Of course we all know that Morris was a wonderful all-round man, but the act of walking round him has always tired me.
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 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.
Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused.
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.
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.
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.
I utilise all my spare moments. I've read twenty-seven of the Hundred Best Books. I collect ferns.