Max Beerbohm

People are either born hosts or born guests.

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

Most women are not as young as they are painted.

— Max Beerbohm

Men of genius are not quick judges of character.

— Max Beerbohm

Pessimism does win us great happy moments.

— Max Beerbohm

Death cancels all engagements.

— Max Beerbohm

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

— Max Beerbohm

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— 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

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

— Max Beerbohm

I am a Tory anarchist. I should like everyone to go about doing just as he pleased - short of altering any…

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

The loveliest face in all the world will not please you if you see it suddenly eye to eye, at a distance…

— Max Beerbohm

The literary gift is a mere accident - is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as…

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

There is in the human race some dark spirit of recalcitrance, always pulling us in the direction contrary to that in which…

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature.

— Max Beerbohm

Only the insane take themselves seriously.

— Max Beerbohm

When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— Max Beerbohm

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

— 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

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

— Max Beerbohm