Quotes By Max Beerbohm

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

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

You will find my last words in the blue folder.

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

All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.

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

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

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

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

No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.

The delicate balance between modesty and conceit is popularity.

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

To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.

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

When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.

Nobody ever died of laughter.

To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature.

You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.

To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme type of all that a host and hostess should not be.

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

People are either born hosts or born guests.

Most women are not as young as they are painted.

Some people are born to lift heavy weights, some are born to juggle golden balls.

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.

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.

I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

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.

Of all the objects of hatred, a woman once loved is the most hateful.

To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people.

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