Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Max Beerbohm - Page 2

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.

Fate weaves the darkness, which is perhaps why she weaves so badly.

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.

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

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

Has the gift of laughter been withdrawn from me?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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Every kind of writing is hypocritical.

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.

Admiration involves a glorious obliquity of vision.

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

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

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

Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused.

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

Men of genius are not quick judges of character.

The lower one's vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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