Quotes from Max Beerbohm

But Oxford never pretended to be strong in mathematics.

When a new Duchess is brought to Tankerton, the oldest elm in the park must be felled.

Judas Iscariot it is who outstands, overshadowing those other fishermen. And perhaps it was by reason of this precedence that Christopher Whitrid, Knight, in the reign of Henry VI., gave the name of Judas to the College which he had founded. Or perhaps it was because he felt that in a Christian community not even the meanest and basest of men should be accounted beneath contempt, beyond redemption.

Your mentality, too, is bully, as we all predicate. One may say without exaggeration that your scholarly and social attainments are a by-word throughout the solar system, and be-yond.

I am Duke of Strathsporran and Cairngorm, Marquis of Sorby, and Earl Cairngorm, in the Peerage of Scotland.

Men of thought, agile on the plane of ideas, devils of fellows among books, they groped feebly in this matter of actual life and death.

The Judas grace (composed, they say, by Christopher Whitrid himself) is noted for its length and for the excellence of its Latinity.

I do not despair that some day we shall place politics upon a sound commercial basis, as they have already done in America and France, or leave them entirely in the hands of the police, as they do in Russia.

His treatise on the Higher Theory of Short Division by Decimals had already won for him a European reputation.

Moreover, he was loth to be thus disturbed in his sombre reverie.

The aposiopesis was icy.

A healthy pallor," qualified the other, who was a constant reader of novels.

The turbot that came after the soup, the champagne that succeeded the sherry, helped to quicken in these men of thought the power to grapple with a reality.

So humanising is sorrow.

She was utterly alone to-night in the midst of a vast indifference.

To love and be scorned—does Fate hold for us a greater inconvenience?

Suppose he went to the Bursar, obtained an exeat, fled straight to London!

Youth is a very good thing to possess, no doubt; but it is a tiresome setting for maturity.

Take away his love for her, and what remained? Nothing—though only in the past twenty-four hours had this love been added to him.

For ever stranded on the isle of an enchantress who would have nothing to do with him!

Academically, the Duke had often reasoned that a man for whom life holds no chance of happiness cannot too quickly shake life off. Now, of a sudden, there was for that theory a vivid application.

Peerless, he was irresponsible—the captain of his soul, the despot of his future.

She was hardly more affable than a cameo.

He realised that to die for love of this lady would be no mere measure of precaution, or counsel of despair. It would be in itself a passionate indulgence—a fiery rapture, not to be foregone.