Max Beerbohm
I believe the twenty-four hour day has come to stay.Collection: Believe
It is a part of English hypocrisy or English reserve, that whilst we are fluent enough in grumbling about small inconveniences, we insist on making light of any great difficulties or grief's that may beset us.Collection: Grief
The loveliest face in all the world will not please you if you see it suddenly eye to eye, at a distance of half an inch from your own.Collection: Beauty
Men prominent in life are mostly hard to converse with. They lack small-talk, and at the same time one doesn't like to confront them with their own great themes.Collection: Men
There is laughter that goes so far as to lose all touch with its motive, and to exist only, grossly, in itself. This is laughter at its best. A man to whom such laughter has often been granted may happen to die in a work-house. No matter. I will not admit that he has failed in life. Another man, who has never laughed thus, may be buried in Westminster Abbey, leaving more than a million pounds overhead. What then? I regard him as a failure.Collection: Laughter
Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge.Collection: School
It distresses me, this failure to keep pace with the leaders of thought, as they pass into oblivion.Collection: Leader
Death cancels all engagements.Collection: Engagement
In every human being one or the other of these two instincts is predominant: the active or positive instinct to offer hospitality, the negative or passive instinct to accept it. And either of these instincts is so significant of character that one might as well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.Collection: Character
I may be old fashioned, but I am right.Collection: May
Have you noticed ... there is never any third act in a nightmare? They bring you to a climax of terror and then leave you there. They are the work of poor dramatists.Collection: Inspirational
"After all," as a pretty girl once said to me, "women are a sex by themselves, so to speak."Collection: Girl
A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.Collection: Crowds
Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused.Collection: Sleep
Of course we all know that Morris was a wonderful all-round man, but the act of walking round him has always tired me.Collection: Tired
The lower one's vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art.Collection: Art
The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.Collection: Inspirational
There is much virtue in a window. It is to a human being as a frame is to a painting, as a proscenium to a play, as 'form' to literature. It strongly defines its content.Collection: Play
For a young man, sleep is a sure solvent of distress. There whirls not for him in the night any so hideous phantasmagoria as will not become, in the clarity of the next morning, a spruce procession for him to lead. Brief the vague horror of his awakening; memory sweeps back to him, and he sees nothing dreadful after all. "Why not?" is the sun's bright message to him, and "Why not indeed?" his answer.Collection: Morning
Fate weaves the darkness, which is perhaps why she weaves so badly.Collection: Fate
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.Collection: Spiritual
A man's work is rather the needful supplement to himself than the outcome of it.Collection: Work
Women who love the same man have a kind of bitter freemasonry.Collection: Love
Has the gift of laughter been withdrawn from me? I protest that I do still, at the age of forty-seven, laugh often and loud and long. But not, I believe, so long and loud and often as in my less smiling youth. And I am proud, nowadays, of laughing, and grateful to any one who makes me laugh. That is a bad sign. I no longer take laughter as a matter of course.Collection: Laughter
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.Collection: Easier
Improvisation is the essence of good talk. Heaven defend us from the talker who doles out things prepared for us; but let heaven not less defend us from the beautiful spontaneous writer who puts his trust in the inspiration of the moment.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Dark
Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.Collection: Song
True dandyism is the result of an artistic temperament working upon a fine body within the wide limits of fashion.Collection: Fashion
The literary gift is a mere accident - is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as it is denied to strenuous sages.Collection: Sage
I am a Tory anarchist. I should like everyone to go about doing just as he pleased - short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.Collection: Politics
Beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied.Collection: Lust
By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.Collection: Writing
Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie.Collection: Money
But to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia.Collection: Laughter
Few, as I have said, are the humorists who can induce this state. To master and dissolve us, to give us the joy of being worn down and tired out with laughter, is a success to be won by no man save in virtue of a rare staying-power. Laughter becomes extreme only if it be consecutive. There must be no pauses for recovery. Touch-and-go humour, however happy, is not enough. The jester must be able to grapple his theme and hang on to it, twisting it this way and that, and making it yield magically all manner of strange and precious things.Collection: Laughter
The critic who justly admires all kinds of things simultaneously cannot love any one of them.Collection: Criticism
A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.Collection: Cities
The hospitable instinct is not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism mixed up with it.Collection: Pride
What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead - so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next centuryCollection: Oscars
Reverence is a good thing, and part of its value is that the more we revere a man, the more sharply are we struck by anything in him (and there is always much) that is incongruous with his greatness.Collection: Respect
She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.Collection: Music
I prefer that laughter shall take me unawares. Only so can it master and dissolve me.Collection: Laughter
For people who like that kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they like.Collection: People
Not that I had any special reason for hating school. Strange as it may seem to my readers, I was not unpopular there. I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.Collection: Hate
Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.Collection: Time
Admiration involves a glorious obliquity of vision.Collection: Vision
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.Collection: Taken
Every kind of writing is hypocritical.Collection: Writing