Max Beerbohm > Quotes

“Only the insane take themselves seriously.”
― Max Beerbohm

“Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.”
― Max Beerbohm

“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.”
― Max Beerbohm

“History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other."

[1880]”
― Max Beerbohm, Collected Works of Max Beerbohm

“I utilise all my spare moments. I've read twenty-seven of the Hundred Best Books. I collect ferns.”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“Death, as he had said, cancelled all engagements.”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“Mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.”
― Max Beerbohm

“Some people are born to lift heavy weights,
some are born to juggle golden balls.”
― Max Beerbohm

“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 unsage to make a simple and direct statement. So what is one to do? The dilema needs a whole volume to itself.”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.”
― Max Beerbohm

“But 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.”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“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.”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson, or, an Oxford love story

“Nobody ever died of laughter.”
― Max Beerbohm

“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 man were not a gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this time, some real progress towards civilisation. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost—he becomes just an unit in unreason.”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“Our hero's unreasoning rage was fed by a not unreasonable jealousy. It was clear to him that Zuleika had forgotten his existence. To-day, as soon as he had killed her love, she had shown him how much less to her was his love than the crowd's. And now again it was only the crowd she cared for. He followed with his eyes her long slender figure as she threaded her way in and out of the crowd, sinuously, confidingly, producing a penny from one lad's elbow, a threepenny-bit from between another's neck and collar, half a crown from another's hair, and always repeating in that flute-like voice of hers: "Well, this is rather queer!”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“It is the privilege of nobility to condescend.”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.”
― Max Beerbohm

“The true conjurer finds his guerdon in the consciousness of work done perfectly and for its own sake.”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“History,' it has been said, 'does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.”
― Max Beerbohm, The Works of Max Beerbohm

“She was one of those who are born to make chaos cosmic.”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“But the dullard’s envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“From those pedestals which intersperse the railing of the Sheldonian, the high grim busts of the Roman Emperors stared down at the fair stranger in the equipage. Zuleika returned their stare with but a casual glance. The inanimate had little charm for her.”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“He was too much concerned with his own perfection ever to think of admiring any one else.”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson, or, an Oxford love story

“Does the stag in his hour of victory need a diploma from the hind?”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself.”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“Oh,” every stair creaked faintly, “I ought to have been marble!”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“It, one suspects, must have had much to do with the evocation of what is called the Oxford spirit—that gentlest spirit, so lingering and searching, so dear to them who as youths were brought into ken of it, so exasperating to them who were not. Yes, certainly, it is this mild, miasmal air, not less than the grey beauty and gravity of the buildings, that has helped Oxford to produce, and foster eternally, her peculiar race of artist-scholars, scholar-artists. The”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson, or, an Oxford love story

“The unforgettable thing in his life is usually not a thing he has done or left undone, but a thing done to him—some insolence or cruelty for which he could not, or did not, avenge himself.”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson, or, an Oxford love story

“Because I was a pedant. I tried to ignore you, as pedants always do try to ignore any fact they cannot fit into their pet system.”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“I could no more marry a man about whom I could not make a fool of myself than I could marry one who made a fool of himself about me. Else had I long ceased to be a spinster.”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson