Max Beerbohm Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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

All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.

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

The delicate balance between modesty and conceit is popularity.

When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Nobody ever died of laughter.

Death cancels all engagements.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme type of all that a host and hostess should not be.

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