English essayist & caricaturist (1872-1956)
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.
MAX BEERBOHM
Zuleika Dobson
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.
MAX BEERBOHM
Quia Imperfectum
Mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.
MAX BEERBOHM
Hosts and Guests
Few, as I have said, are the humorists who can induce this state. To master and dissolve us, to give us the joy of being worn down and tired out with laughter, is a success to be won by no man save in virtue of a rare staying-power. Laughter becomes extreme only if it be consecutive. There must be no pauses for recovery. Touch-and-go humour, however happy, is not enough. The jester must be able to grapple his theme and hang on to it, twisting it this way and that, and making it yield magically all manner of strange and precious things.
MAX BEERBOHM
"Laughter", And Even Now
I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
MAX BEERBOHM
"Going Back to School", More
There is much to be said for failure. It is much more interesting than success.
MAX BEERBOHM
The Incomparable Max
There is in the human race some dark spirit of recalcitrance, always pulling us in the direction contrary to that in which we are reasonably expected to go.
MAX BEERBOHM
Works
Most women are not so young as they are painted.
MAX BEERBOHM
A Defence of Cosmetics
Life is a muddle. It seems a brilliant muddle, if you are an optimist; a dull one, if you aren't; but in neither case can you deny that it is the muddlers who keep it going.
MAX BEERBOHM
The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm
You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.
MAX BEERBOHM
Zuleika Dobson
And in the past there is so blessedly nothing for us to worry about. Everything is settled.
MAX BEERBOHM
Lytton Strachey
The Nonconformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.
MAX BEERBOHM
King George the Fourth
A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.
MAX BEERBOHM
Zuleika Dobson
I prefer that laughter shall take me unawares. Only so can it master and dissolve me.
MAX BEERBOHM
"Laughter", And Even Now
Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.
MAX BEERBOHM
"An Inquiry into a Convention", Saturday Review, December 19, 1903
All memories were for her but as the motes in one fused radiance that followed her and made more luminous the pathway of her future.
MAX BEERBOHM
Zuleika Dobson
Of all the objects of hatred, a woman once loved is the most hateful.
MAX BEERBOHM
Zuleika Dobson
Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.
MAX BEERBOHM
Conversations with Max
But to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia.
MAX BEERBOHM
"Laughter", And Even Now
The course of history has often been turned by sentiment, but by thought never. The thinkers are but valuable ornaments. A safe place is assigned to them on the world's mantelpiece, while humanity basks and blinks stupidly on the hearth.
MAX BEERBOHM
The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm