Max Beerbohm Quotes

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

"Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter"

"To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature"

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

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

"Nobody ever died of laughter."

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

". . . but beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied."

"Men of genius are so few that they ought to atone for their fewness by being at any rate ubiquitous."

"`Ah, say that again,' she murmured. `Your voice is music.' He repeated his question. `Music,' she said dreamily; and such is the force of habit that `I don't,' she added, `know anything about music, really. But I know what I like.'"

"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."

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

"There is always something rather absurd about the past"

"The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all."

"Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge."

"You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men."

"No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt"

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

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

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