Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Max Beerbohm

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English actor Max Beerbohm.

Last updated on November 25, 2024.

Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm was an English essayist, parodist and caricaturist under the signature Max. He first became known in the 1890s as a dandy and a humourist. He was the drama critic for the Saturday Review from 1898 until 1910, when he relocated to Rapallo, Italy. In his later years he was popular for his occasional radio broadcasts. Among his best-known works is his only novel, Zuleika Dobson, published in 1911. His caricatures, drawn usually in pen or pencil with muted watercolour tinting, are in many public collections.

English - Actor | August 24, 1872 - May 20, 1956

Source: Wikipedia

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

Max Beerbohm

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

Max Beerbohm

We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of Americans.

Max Beerbohm

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

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

Max Beerbohm

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

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

To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature.

Max Beerbohm

All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.

Max Beerbohm

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

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

Max Beerbohm

You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.

Max Beerbohm

To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people.

Max Beerbohm

Nobody ever died of laughter.

Max Beerbohm

Most women are not as young as they are painted.

Max Beerbohm

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

Max Beerbohm

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

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

Max Beerbohm

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

Max Beerbohm

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

Max Beerbohm

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

Max Beerbohm

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

Max Beerbohm

To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.

Max Beerbohm

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

Max Beerbohm

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

Max Beerbohm

You will find my last words in the blue folder.

Max Beerbohm

It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality.

Max Beerbohm

Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.

Max Beerbohm

People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table.

Max Beerbohm

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

Max Beerbohm

Some people are born to lift heavy weights, some are born to juggle golden balls.

Max Beerbohm

When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.

Max Beerbohm

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

Max Beerbohm

The delicate balance between modesty and conceit is popularity.

Max Beerbohm

People are either born hosts or born guests.

Max Beerbohm

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

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

Max Beerbohm

I may be old fashioned, but I am right.

Max Beerbohm

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

To destroy is still the strongest instinct of our nature.

Max Beerbohm

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

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

Max Beerbohm

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

Max Beerbohm

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

Max Beerbohm

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

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

Max Beerbohm

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

Max Beerbohm

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

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

Max Beerbohm

Death cancels all engagements.

Max Beerbohm

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

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.

Max Beerbohm

Only the insane take themselves seriously.

Max Beerbohm

Pessimism does win us great happy moments.

Max Beerbohm

Sometimes I feel that I am a natural born genius in a field of human endeavor that hasn't been invented yet

Max Beerbohm

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

Max Beerbohm

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.

Max Beerbohm

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

Max Beerbohm

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

Max Beerbohm

There is laughter that goes so far as to lose all touch with its motive, and to exist only, grossly, in itself. This is laughter at its best. A man to whom such laughter has often been granted may happen to die in a work-house. No matter. I will not admit that he has failed in life. Another man, who has never laughed thus, may be buried in Westminster Abbey, leaving more than a million pounds overhead. What then? I regard him as a failure.

Max Beerbohm

Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Max Beerbohm

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