Quotes from Max Beerbohm

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.

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

It is a fact that not once in all my life have I gone out for a walk. I have been taken out for walks; but that is another matter.

What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead - so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century

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

One might well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.

People are either born hosts or born guests.

A hundred eyes were fixed on her, and half as many hearts lost to her.

Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently. Things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth.

It is easier, as Michelet suggested, for a woman to change her opinion of a man than for him to change his opinion of himself.

You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men. For the attractive woman, dogs are mere dumb and restless brutes—possibly dangerous, certainly soulless. Yet will coquetry teach her to caress any dog in the presence of a man enslaved by her.

The gods can make a man ridiculous through a woman, but they cannot make him ridiculous when they deal him a blow direct. The very greatness of their power makes them, in that respect, impotent.

The peripety was according to the best rules of tragic art.

Sensitive reader, start not at the apparition! Oxford is a plexus of anomalies.

The reading-room? "Of the British Museum. I go there every day." "You do? I've only been there once. I'm afraid I found it rather a depressing place. It—it seemed to sap one's vitality. It doe. That's why I go there. The lower one's vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art.

Told? I am a Gallio for such follies.

If a man carry his sense of proportion far enough, lo! he is back at the point from which he started. He knows that eternity, as conceived by him, is but an instant in eternity, and infinity but a speck in infinity.

If man were not a gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this time, some real progress towards civilisation. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost—he becomes just a unit in unreason.

He sat gazing into the past.

To slur and sully, to belittle and drag down—that was what the world always tried to do.

Not for an instant did he flinch from the mere fact of dying to-day…To die 'untimely,' as men called it, was the timeliest of deaths for one who had carved his youth to greatness. What perfection could he, Dorset, achieve beyond what was already his? Future years could but stale, if not actually mar, that perfection. Yes, it was lucky to perish leaving much to the imagination of posterity. Dear posterity was of a sentimental, not a realistic, habit.

It, one suspects, must have had much to do with the evocation of what is called the Oxford spirit—that gentlest spirit, so lingering and searching, so dear to them who as youths were brought into ken of it, so exasperating to them who were not. Yes, certainly, it is this mild, miasmal air, not less than the grey beauty and gravity of the buildings, that has helped Oxford to produce, and foster eternally, her peculiar race of artist-scholars, scholar-artists. The

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.

As she sat here in the bay-window of her room, she was not reviewing the splendid pageant of her past. She was a young person whose reveries never were in retrospect. For her the part 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 the motes in one fused radiance that followed her and made more luminous the pathway of her future. She was always looking forward.