Max Beerbohm Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

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
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 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
It needs no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.

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

Max Beerbohm
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
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
Improvisation is the essence of good talk. Heaven defend us from the talker who doles out things prepared for us!

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

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

Max Beerbohm
Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.

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
Has the gift of laughter been withdrawn from me?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
He was too much concerned with his own perfection ever to think of admiring any one else.

Max Beerbohm
Humor undiluted is the most depressing of all phenomena. Humor must have its background of seriousness. Without this contrast there comes none of that incongruity which is the mainspring of laughter.

Max Beerbohm
I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased — short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.

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
The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play.

Max Beerbohm
The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.
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Max Beerbohm
Vulgarity has its uses. Vulgarity often cuts ice which refinement scrapes at vainly.

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
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
When asked to contribute to W. G. Grace's testimonial:
It's not in support of cricket but as an earnest protest against golf.

Max Beerbohm
As a teacher, as a propagandist, Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality, he is immortal.

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

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