Max Beerbohm Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Max Beerbohm
Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.

Max Beerbohm
I prefer that laughter shall take me unawares. Only so can it master and dissolve me.

Max Beerbohm
Death knocks, as we know, at the door of the cottage and of the castle. He stalks up the front-garden and the steep steps of the semi-detached villa, and piles the ornamental knocker so imperiously that the panels of imitation stained glass quiver in the thin front-door.

Max Beerbohm
Just as "pluck" comes of breeding, so is endurance especially an attribute of the artist. Because he can stand outside himself, and (if there be nothing ignoble in them) take pleasure in his own sufferings, the artist has a huge advantage over you and me.

Max Beerbohm
The fading signals and grey eternal walls of that antique station, which, familiar to them and insignificant, does yet whisper to the tourist the last enchantments of the Middle Age.

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

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

Max Beerbohm
Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.

Max Beerbohm
I was not unpopular [at school]…It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

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

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

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

Max Beerbohm
Deeply regret inform your grace last night two black owls came and perched on battlements remained there through night hooting at dawn flew away none knows whither awaiting instructions Jellings.
Telegram

Max Beerbohm
She was one of the people who say 'I don't know anything about music really, but I know what I like.'

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

Max Beerbohm
The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.

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

Max Beerbohm
It is doubtful whether the people of Southern England have even yet realized how much introspection there is going on all the time int he Five Towns.

Max Beerbohm