Max Beerbohm

Nobody ever died of laughter.

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

I may be old fashioned, but I am right.

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

You will find my last words in the blue folder.

— Max Beerbohm

Admiration involves a glorious obliquity of vision.

— Max Beerbohm

To destroy is still the strongest instinct of our nature.

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

Reverence is a good thing, and part of its value is that the more we revere a man, the more sharply are…

— Max Beerbohm

Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of…

— Max Beerbohm

A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them…

— Max Beerbohm

It is a part of English hypocrisy or English reserve, that whilst we are fluent enough in grumbling about small inconveniences, we…

— Max Beerbohm

Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and…

— Max Beerbohm

To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme type of all that a host and hostess should…

— Max Beerbohm

Have you noticed ... there is never any third act in a nightmare? They bring you to a climax of terror and…

— Max Beerbohm

It is so much easier to covet what one hasn't than to revel in what one has. Also, it is so much…

— Max Beerbohm

The most perfect caricature is that which, on a small surface, with the simplest means, most accurately exaggerates, to the highest point,…

— Max Beerbohm

“Not for an instant did he flinch from the mere fact of dying to-day…To die ‘untimely,’ as men called it, was the…

— Max Beerbohm

“One is taught to refrain from irony, because mankind does tend to take it literally. In the hearing of the gods, who…

— Max Beerbohm

In every human being one or the other of these two instincts is predominant: the active or positive instinct to offer hospitality,…

— Max Beerbohm

Has the gift of laughter been withdrawn from me? I protest that I do still, at the age of forty-seven, laugh often…

— Max Beerbohm

For a young man, sleep is a sure solvent of distress. There whirls not for him in the night any so hideous…

— Max Beerbohm

There is laughter that goes so far as to lose all touch with its motive, and to exist only, grossly, in itself.…

— Max Beerbohm

Improvisation is the essence of good talk. Heaven defend us from the talker who doles out things prepared for us; but let…

— Max Beerbohm

“As she sat here in the bay-window of her room, she was not reviewing the splendid pageant of her past. She was…

— Max Beerbohm

“Our hero's unreasoning rage was fed by a not unreasonable jealousy. It was clear to him that Zuleika had forgotten his existence.…

— Max Beerbohm

Few, as I have said, are the humorists who can induce this state. To master and dissolve us, to give us the…

— Max Beerbohm

“Is there," he asked with a bitter smile, "any one of you who doesn't with his whole heart love Miss Dobson?” Nobody…

— Max Beerbohm

“Aye, by all minerals we are mocked. Vegetables, yearly deciduous, are far more sympathetic. The lilac and laburnum, making lovely now the…

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.

— Max Beerbohm

Every kind of writing is hypocritical.

— Max Beerbohm