Quotes from Max Beerbohm

Most women are not as young as they are painted.

Humility is a virtue, and it is a virtue innate in guests.

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

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

The delicate balance between modesty and conceit is popularity.

People are either born hosts or born guests.

When hospitality becomes an art, it loses its very soul.

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

Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.

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

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a whole flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.

Life is a muddle. It seems a brilliant muddle, if you are an optimist; a dull one, if you aren't; but in neither case can you deny that it is the muddlers who keep it going.

There is in the human race some dark spirit of recalcitrance, always pulling us in the direction contrary to that in which we are reasonably expected to go.

The Nonconformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

And in the past there is so blessedly nothing for us to worry about. Everything is settled.

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

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

I prefer that laughter shall take me unawares. Only so can it master and dissolve me.

But to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia.

The course of history has often been turned by sentiment, but by thought never. The thinkers are but valuable ornaments. A safe place is assigned to them on the world's mantelpiece, while humanity basks and blinks stupidly on the hearth.

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

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

Most women are not as young as they are painted.

To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature.