Max Beerbohm Quotes - Page 4

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

Admiration involves a glorious obliquity of vision.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Men of genius are not quick judges of character.

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

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

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

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

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