Max Beerbohm Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

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

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Has the gift of laughter been withdrawn from me?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
Oxford walls have a way of belittling us; and the Duke was loath to regard his doom as trivial. Aye, by all minerals we are mocked. Vegetables, yearly deciduous, are far more sympathetic.

Max Beerbohm
The attempt to conceive Infinity had always been quite arduous enough for me.

Max Beerbohm
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.

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

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

Max Beerbohm
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.

Max Beerbohm
Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie.

Max Beerbohm
Lift latch, step in, be welcome, Sir,
Albeit to see you I'm unglad.

Max Beerbohm
You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a whole flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. If man were not a gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this time, some real progress towards civilization. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost —- he becomes a unit in unreason.

Max Beerbohm
The Nonconformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

Max Beerbohm
There is always something rather absurd about the past.

Max Beerbohm
The Duke had an intense horror of unmarried girls.

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

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
Of course he [William Morris] was a wonderful all-round man, but the act of walking round him has always tired me.

Max Beerbohm
She was a young person whose reveries never were in retrospect. For her past was no treasury of distinct memories, all hoarded and classified, some brighter than others and more highly valued. All memories were for her but as the motes in one fused radiance that followed her and made more luminous the pathway of her future.

Max Beerbohm
Though you would often in the fifteenth century have heard the snobbish Roman say, in a would-be off-hand tone, 'I am dining with the Borgias tonight,' no Roman ever was able to say, 'I dined last night with the Borgias.'

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

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
One has never known a good man to whom dogs were not dear; but many of the best women have no such fondness. You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men. For the attractive woman, dogs are mere dumb and restless brutes — possibly dangerous, certainly soulless. Yet will coquetry teach her to caress any dog in the presence of a man enslaved by her.

Max Beerbohm
For a young man, sleep is a sure solvent of distress. There whirls not for him in the night any so hideous phantasmagoria as will not become, in the clarity of the next morning, a spruce procession for him to lead. Brief the vague horror of his awakening; memory sweeps back to him, and he sees nothing dreadful after all. "Why not?" is the sun's bright message to him, and "Why not indeed?" his answer.

Max Beerbohm
I have always thought it was a sound impulse by which he [Kipling] was driven to put his 'Recessional' into the waste-paper basket, and a great pity that Mrs Kipling fished it out and made him send it to The Times.

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

Max Beerbohm
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.

Max Beerbohm
Most women are not so young as they are painted.

Max Beerbohm