Max Beerbohm (1872 – 1956)
English writer and caricaturist.
To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people. A conceited man is satisfied with the effect he produces on himself.
She was a young person whose reveries never were in retrospect. For her past was no treasury of distinct memories, all hoarded and classified, some brighter than others and more highly valued. All memories were for her but as notes in one fused radiance that followed her and made more luminous the pathway of her future.
The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.
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.
Death cancels all engagements.
He heard that whenever a woman was to blame for a disappointment, the best way to avoid a scene was to inculpate oneself.
Oxford walls have a way of belittling us; and the Duke was loath to regard his doom as trivial. Aye, by all minerals we are mocked. Vegetables, yearly deciduous, are far more sympathetic.
As a teacher, as a propagandist, Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality, he is immortal.
All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.
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.
The most perfect caricature is that which, on a small surface, with the simplest means, most accurately exaggerates, to the highest point, the peculiarities of a human being, at his most characteristic moment in the most beautiful manner.
You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a whole flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. If man were not a gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this time, some real progress towards civilization. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost —- he becomes a unit in unreason.
The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.
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.
The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.
Everywhere he found his precept checkmated by his example.
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.”
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.
Most women are not so young as they are painted.
Lift latch, step in, be welcome, Sir,
Albeit to see you I’m unglad.