Max Beerbohm - Man Quotes

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
There is laughter that goes so far as to lose all touch with its motive, and to exist only, grossly, in itself. This is laughter at its best. A man to whom such laughter has often been granted may happen to die in a work-house. No matter. I will not admit that he has failed in life. Another man, who has never laughed thus, may be buried in Westminster Abbey, leaving more than a million pounds overhead. What then? I regard him as a failure.

Max Beerbohm