Max Beerbohm Quotes

They were a tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, weren’t they?

Reminds me of a Christmas-tree decorated by a PreRaphaelite.

The one art-form that has been invented in England.

The thought of him has always slightly irritated me. Of course he was a wonderful all-round man, but the act of walking round him has always tired me.

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

I maintain that though you would often in the fifteenth century have heard the snobbish Roman say, in a would-be off-hand tone, ‘I am dining with the Borgias tonight,’ no Roman ever was able to say, ‘I dined last night with the Borgias.’

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

I looked out for what the metropolitan reviewers would have to say. They seemed to fall into two classes: those who had little to say and those who had nothing.

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

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind- legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.

She was one of the people who say ‘I don’t know anything about music really, but I know what I like.’

You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself.

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

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

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

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

She was one of those born to make chaos cosmic.

When a public man lays his hand on his heart and declares that his conduct needs no apology, the audience hastens to put up its umbrellas against the particularly severe downpour of apologies in store for it. I won’t give the customary warning.My conduct shrieks aloud for apology, and you are in for a thorough drenching.

[At school] I was a modest, good humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

I have the satiric temperament : when I am laughing at anyone I am generally rather amusing, but when I am praising anyone, I am always deadly dull.