Max Beerbohm Quotes - Page 3

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Every kind of writing is hypocritical.

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

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

Has the gift of laughter been withdrawn from me?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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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