Max Beerbohm Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

He heard that whenever a woman was to blame for a disappointment, the best way to avoid a scene was to inculpate oneself.

Max Beerbohm
Enter Michael Angelo. Andrea del Sarto appears for a moment at a window. Pippa passes.

Max Beerbohm
To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.

Max Beerbohm
Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.

Max Beerbohm
She had the air of a born unpacker - swift and firm, yet withal tender... She was one of those born to make chaos cosmic.

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
Beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied.

Max Beerbohm
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.

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
She had the sensitiveness, though no other quality whatsoever, of the true artist.

Max Beerbohm
Great men are but life-sized. Most of them, indeed, are rather short.

Max Beerbohm
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.

Max Beerbohm
Men of genius are so few that they ought to atone for their fewness by being at any rate ubiquitous.

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
To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people. A conceited man is satisfied with the effect he produces on himself.

Max Beerbohm
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.

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

Max Beerbohm
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.

Max Beerbohm
Anywhere but in England it would be impossible for two solitary men, howsoever much reduced by influenza, to spend five or six days in the same hostel and not exchange a single word. This is one of the charms of England.

Max Beerbohm
Everywhere he found his precept checkmated by his example.

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

Max Beerbohm
I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

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

Max Beerbohm
The hospitable instinct is not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism mixed up with it.

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

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