Best 90 quotes of Max Beerbohm on MyQuotes

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.

Admiration involves a glorious obliquity of vision.

"After all," as a pretty girl once said to me, "women are a sex by themselves, so to speak.

A hundred eyes were fixed on her, and half as many hearts lost to her.

All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.

A man's work is rather the needful supplement to himself than the outcome of it.

Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently. Things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth.

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

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.

But to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia.

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

Every kind of writing is hypocritical.

Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie.

Few, as I have said, are the humorists who can induce this state. To master and dissolve us, to give us the joy of being worn down and tired out with laughter, is a success to be won by no man save in virtue of a rare staying-power. Laughter becomes extreme only if it be consecutive. There must be no pauses for recovery. Touch-and-go humour, however happy, is not enough. The jester must be able to grapple his theme and hang on to it, twisting it this way and that, and making it yield magically all manner of strange and precious things.

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.

Golf: The most ... perfect expression of National Stupidity.

Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.

Has the gift of laughter been withdrawn from me? I protest that I do still, at the age of forty-seven, laugh often and loud and long. But not, I believe, so long and loud and often as in my less smiling youth. And I am proud, nowadays, of laughing, and grateful to any one who makes me laugh. That is a bad sign. I no longer take laughter as a matter of course.

Have you noticed ... there is never any third act in a nightmare? They bring you to a climax of terror and then leave you there. They are the work of poor dramatists.

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

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

Humility is a virtue, and it is a virtue innate in guests.

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.

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

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.

I may be old fashioned, but I am right.

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.

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.

In every human being one or the other of these two instincts is predominant: the active or positive instinct to offer hospitality, the negative or passive instinct to accept it. And either of these instincts is so significant of character that one might as well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Men of genius are not quick judges of character.

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.

Most women are not as young as they are painted.

Nobody ever died of laughter.

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

No Roman ever was able to say, 'I dined last night with the Borgias'.

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

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.

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

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

One might well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.

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

Only the insane take themselves seriously.

People are either born hosts or born guests.

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