Max Beerbohm - Zuleika Dobson (1911)

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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
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
He was too much concerned with his own perfection ever to think of admiring any one else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Max Beerbohm