Top 100 Max Beerbohm Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “When the day came for her departure, the city wore such an air of sullen mourning as it had not worn since the Prussians marched to its Elysee.”

— Max Beerbohm

54. “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

55. “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

56. “But to die of laughter – this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia.”

— Max Beerbohm

57. “It distresses me, this failure to keep pace with the leaders of thought, as they pass into oblivion.”

— Max Beerbohm

58. “Because I was a pedant. I tried to ignore you, as pedants always do try to ignore any fact they cannot fit into their pet system.”

— Max Beerbohm

59. “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

60. “Every kind of writing is hypocritical.”

— Max Beerbohm

61. “Men of genius are not quick judges of character.”

— Max Beerbohm

62. “Yet often you talk as though you had read rather much. Your way of speech has what is called ‘the literary flavour’.”

— Max Beerbohm

63. “By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.”

— Max Beerbohm

64. “What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead – so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century.”

— Max Beerbohm

65. “It is the privilege of nobility to condescend.”

— Max Beerbohm

66. “Not that I had any special reason for hating school. Strange as it may seem to my readers, I was not unpopular there. I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.”

— Max Beerbohm

67. “No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.”

— Max Beerbohm

68. “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

69. “Does the stag in his hour of victory need a diploma from the hind?”

— Max Beerbohm

70. “The critic who justly admires all kinds of things simultaneously cannot love any one of them.”

— Max Beerbohm

71. “I believe the twenty-four hour day has come to stay.”

— Max Beerbohm

72. “From those pedestals which intersperse the railing of the Sheldonian, the high grim busts of the Roman Emperors stared down at the fair stranger in the equipage. Zuleika returned their stare with but a casual glance. The inanimate had little charm for her.”

— Max Beerbohm

73. “As she sat here in the bay-window of her room, she was not reviewing the splendid pageant of her past. She was a young person whose reveries never were in retrospect. For her the part 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. She was always looking forward.”

— Max Beerbohm

74. “Great men are but life-sized. Most of them, indeed, are rather short.”

— Max Beerbohm

75. “You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself.”

— Max Beerbohm

76. “Dear posterity was of a sentimental, not a realistic, habit.”

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

78. “He sat gazing into the past.”

— Max Beerbohm

79. “Admiration involves a glorious obliquity of vision.”

— Max Beerbohm

80. “I prefer that laughter shall take me unawares. Only so can it master and dissolve me.”

— Max Beerbohm

81. “It, one suspects, must have had much to do with the evocation of what is called the Oxford spirit – that gentlest spirit, so lingering and searching, so dear to them who as youths were brought into ken of it, so exasperating to them who were not. Yes, certainly, it is this mild, miasmal air, not less than the grey beauty and gravity of the buildings, that has helped Oxford to produce, and foster eternally, her peculiar race of artist-scholars, scholar-artists. The.”

— Max Beerbohm

82. “The unforgettable thing in his life is usually not a thing he has done or left undone, but a thing done to him – some insolence or cruelty for which he could not, or did not, avenge himself.”

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

84. “Heroes are very human, most of them; very easily touched by praise.”

— Max Beerbohm

85. “True dandyism is the result of an artistic temperament working upon a fine body within the wide limits of fashion.”

— Max Beerbohm

86. “And Americans, individually, are of all people the most anxious to please. That they talk overmuch is often taken as a sign of self-satisfaction. It is merely a mannerism. Rhetoric is a thing inbred in them. They are quite unconscious of it.”

— Max Beerbohm

87. “She was one of those who are born to make chaos cosmic.”

— Max Beerbohm

88. “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

89. “If a man carry his sense of proportion far enough, lo! he is back at the point from which he started. He knows that eternity, as conceived by him, is but an instant in eternity, and infinity but a speck in infinity.”

— Max Beerbohm

90. “You wondered even when you heard that he was wont at Oxford to make without help his toilet of every day. Well, the true dandy is always capable of such high independence. He is craftsman as well as artist.”

— Max Beerbohm

91. “The most perfect caricature is that which, on a small surface, with the simplest means, most accurately exaggerates, to the highest point, the peculiarities of a human being, at his most characteristic moment in the most beautiful manner.”

— Max Beerbohm

92. “To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.”

— Max Beerbohm

93. “I could no more marry a man about whom I could not make a fool of myself than I could marry one who made a fool of himself about me. Else had I long ceased to be a spinster.”

— Max Beerbohm

94. “Oh,” every stair creaked faintly, “I ought to have been marble!”

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

96. “In the hearing of the gods, who hear all, it is conversely unsafe to make a simple and direct statement.”

— Max Beerbohm

97. “As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality, he is immortal.”

— Max Beerbohm

98. “The gods can make a man ridiculous through a woman, but they cannot make him ridiculous when they deal him a blow direct. The very greatness of their power makes them, in that respect, impotent.”

— Max Beerbohm

99. “Death, as he had said, cancelled all engagements.”

— Max Beerbohm

100. “Here was he, going to die for her; and here was she, blaming him for a breach of manners. Decidedly, the slave had the whip-hand.”

— Max Beerbohm