Top 100 Max Beerbohm Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The one real goal of education is to leave a person asking questions.”

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

3. “You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.”

— Max Beerbohm

4. “To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature.”

— Max Beerbohm

5. “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

6. “People seem to think there is something inherently noble and virtuous in the desire to go for a walk.”

— Max Beerbohm

7. “Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.”

— Max Beerbohm

8. “A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.”

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

10. “When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.”

— Max Beerbohm

11. “It is a fact that not once in all my life have I gone out for a walk. I have been taken out for walks; but that is another matter.”

— Max Beerbohm

12. “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

13. “There is much to be said for failure. It is much more interesting than success.”

— Max Beerbohm

14. “It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality.”

— Max Beerbohm

15. “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

16. “History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.”

— Max Beerbohm

17. “I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.”

— Max Beerbohm

18. “Death cancels all engagements.”

— Max Beerbohm

19. “The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.”

— Max Beerbohm

20. “I am a Tory anarchist. I should like everyone to go about doing just as he pleased – short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.”

— Max Beerbohm

21. “Women who love the same man have a kind of bitter freemasonry.”

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

23. “The true conjurer finds his guerdon in the consciousness of work done perfectly and for its own sake.”

— Max Beerbohm

24. “Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.”

— Max Beerbohm

25. “For people who like that kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they like.”

— Max Beerbohm

26. “Only the insane take themselves seriously.”

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

28. “Of course we all know that Morris was a wonderful all-round man, but the act of walking round him has always tired me.”

— Max Beerbohm

29. “Men prominent in life are mostly hard to converse with. They lack small-talk, and at the same time one doesn’t like to confront them with their own great themes.”

— Max Beerbohm

30. “The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends...”

— Max Beerbohm

31. “Pessimism does win us great happy moments.”

— Max Beerbohm

32. “You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a 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 civilisation. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost – he becomes just an unit in unreason.”

— Max Beerbohm

33. “The literary gift is a mere accident – is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as it is denied to strenuous sages.”

— Max Beerbohm

34. “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

35. “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

36. “Byron! – he would be all forgotten to-day if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to “The Times” about the Repeal of the Corn Laws.”

— Max Beerbohm

37. “The hospitable instinct is not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism mixed up with it.”

— Max Beerbohm

38. “Nobody ever died of laughter.”

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

40. “I utilise all my spare moments. I’ve read twenty-seven of the Hundred Best Books. I collect ferns.”

— Max Beerbohm

41. “I may be old fashioned, but I am right.”

— Max Beerbohm

42. “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

43. “A man’s work is rather the needful supplement to himself than the outcome of it.”

— Max Beerbohm

44. “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

45. “Sometimes I feel that I am a natural born genius in a field of human endeavor that hasn’t been invented yet.”

— Max Beerbohm

46. “Strange when you come to think of it, that of all countless folk who have lived on this planet, not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.”

— Max Beerbohm

47. “The lower one’s vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art.”

— Max Beerbohm

48. “Improvisation is the essence of good talk. Heaven defend us from the talker who doles out things prepared for us; but let heaven not less defend us from the beautiful spontaneous writer who puts his trust in the inspiration of the moment.”

— Max Beerbohm

49. “It is a part of English hypocrisy or English reserve, that whilst we are fluent enough in grumbling about small inconveniences, we insist on making light of any great difficulties or grief’s that may beset us.”

— Max Beerbohm

50. “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