Max Beerbohm Quotes
August 24, 1872 – 20 May 1956
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Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for
a man's footprint.
1911Zuleika Dobson, ch.2. 
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More Max Beerbohm Quotes
She was one of those born to make chaos cosmic.
Max Beerbohm— 1911Zuleika Dobson, ch.2.
You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself.
Max Beerbohm— 1911Zuleika Dobson, ch.7.
She was one of the people who say 'I don't know anything about music really, but I know what I like.'
Max Beerbohm— 1911Zuleika Dobson, ch.9.
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— 1911Zuleika Dobson, ch.9.
The Socratic method is not a game at which two can play.
Max Beerbohm— 1911Zuleika Dobson, ch.15.
The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.
Max Beerbohm— King George the Fourth (1894)
Most women are not so young as they are painted.
Max Beerbohm— A Defense of Cosmetics (1895)
To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.
Max Beerbohm— "1880" (1895) from The Works of Max Beerbohm (1896)[1]
Lift latch, step in, be welcome, Sir, Albeit to see you I’m unglad.
Max Beerbohm— A Luncheon
Only the insane take themselves quite seriously.
Max Beerbohm— Quoted in Max by David Cecil (1964), ch. 2
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.
Max Beerbohm— "Fenestralia", Mainly on the Air (1946), The Atlantic (April 1944)
Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.
Max Beerbohm— Ch. II (Zuleika Dobson (1911))
She was a young person whose reveries never were in retrospect. For her past was no treasury of distinct memories, all hoarded and classified, some brighter than others and more highly valued. All memories were for her but as notes in one fused radiance that followed her and made more luminous the pathway of her future.
Max Beerbohm— Ch. II (Zuleika Dobson (1911))
He was too much concerned with his own perfection ever to think of admiring any one else.
Max Beerbohm— Ch. III (Zuleika Dobson (1911))
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.”
Max Beerbohm— Ch. IV (Zuleika Dobson (1911))
Death cancels all engagements.
Max Beerbohm— Ch. VII (Zuleika Dobson (1911))
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.
Max Beerbohm— Ch. VIII (Zuleika Dobson (1911))
She was one of those people who say "I don't know anything about music really, but I know what I like."
Max Beerbohm— Ch. IX (Zuleika Dobson (1911))
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— Ch. IX (Zuleika Dobson (1911))
Of all the objects of hatred, a woman once loved is the most hateful.
Max Beerbohm— Ch. XIII (Zuleika Dobson (1911))
Just as "pluck" comes of breeding, so is endurance especially an attribute of the artist. Because he can stand outside himself, and (if there be nothing ignoble in them) take pleasure in his own sufferings, the artist has a huge advantage over you and me.
Max Beerbohm— Ch. XV (Zuleika Dobson (1911))
The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play.
Max Beerbohm— Ch. XV (Zuleika Dobson (1911))
I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.
Max Beerbohm— Servants (1918)
Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.
Max Beerbohm— Laughter (1920)
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.
Max Beerbohm— Quia Imperfectum (1920)
To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people. A conceited man is satisfied with the effect he produces on himself.
Max Beerbohm— Quia Imperfectum
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.
Max Beerbohm— Quia Imperfectum
It needs no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.
Max Beerbohm— Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson (1911).
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.
Max Beerbohm— Max Beerbohm, Going Back to School.
