Max Beerbohm Quotes

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. If man were not a gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this time, some real progress towards civilization. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost —- he becomes a unit in unreason.

He was too much concerned with his own perfection ever to think of admiring any one else.

The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play.

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

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.

All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.

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.”

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

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.

The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.

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.

The Nonconformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

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

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.

Everywhere he found his precept checkmated by his example.