Quotes from Max Beerbohm

To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.

You will find my last words in the blue folder.

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.

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.

Men of genius are not quick judges of character.

Great men are but life-sized. Most of them, indeed, are rather short.

Of course we all know that Morris was a wonderful all-round man, but the act of walking round him has always tired me.

Reverence is a good thing, and part of its value is that the more we revere a man, the more sharply are we struck by anything in him (and there is always much) that is incongruous with his greatness.

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

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

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

I am a Tory anarchist. I should like everyone to go about doing just as he pleased - short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.

As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality, he is immortal.

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

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

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

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

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

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

There is much to be said for failure. It is much more interesting than success.

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.

Nobody ever died of laughter.

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