Quotes from Max Beerbohm

It is so much easier to covet what one hasn't than to revel in what one has. Also, it is so much easier to be enthusiastic about what exists than about what doesn't. The future doesn't exist. The past does.

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. If

And Americans, individually, are of all people the most anxious to please. That they talk overmuch is often taken as a sign of self-satisfaction. It is merely a mannerism. Rhetoric is a thing inbred in them. They are quite unconscious of it.

Dear posterity was of a sentimental, not a realistic, habit.

Byron!—he would be all forgotten to-day if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to "The Times" about the Repeal of the Corn Laws.

One is taught to refrain from irony, because mankind does tend to take it literally.

In the hearing of the gods, who hear all, it is conversely unsafe to make a simple and direct statement.

When the day came for her departure, the city wore such an air of sullen mourning as it had not worn since the Prussians marched to its Elysee.

He had heard that whenever a woman was to blame for a disappointment, the best way to avoid a scene was to inculpate oneself.

She was particularly struck by a remark of Aristotle's, that tragedy was "more philosophic" than history, inasmuch as it concerned itself with what might be, while history was concerned with merely what had been.

Nature, fashioning him, had fashioned also a pedestal for him to stand and brood on, to pose and sing on. Off that pedestal he was lost.

To us, for whom so quickly "time doth transfix the flourish set on youth," there is something strange, even a trifle ludicrous, in the thought that Zeus, after all these years, is still at the beck and call of his passions.

Yet often you talk as though you had read rather much. Your way of speech has what is called 'the literary flavour'.

Explain yourself! he commanded. Isn't that rather much for a man to ask of a woman? I don't know. I have no experience of women. In the abstract, it seems to me that every man has a right to some explanation from the woman who has ruined his life. (page 90)

I must motor to Windsor for this wretched Investiture.

Different from Zuleika, he cared for his wardrobe and his toilet-table not as a means to making others admire him the more, but merely as a means through which he could intensify, a ritual in which to express and realise, his own idolatry.

but she wanted ALL Oxford to see her—see her NOW.

There he adjusted his hat with care, and regarded himself very seriously, very sternly, from various angles, like a man invited to paint his own portrait for the Uffizi.

He knew well, however, that women care little for a man's appearance, and that what they seek in a man is strength of character, and rank, and wealth.

She remembered having read that all the greatest men in history had been of less than the middle height.

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.

It was the first kiss he had ever given outside his family circle.

What manner of man, he wondered, was he? A coward, piling profligacy on poltroonery? Or a hero, claiming exemption from moral law?