Max Beerbohm

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.

It distresses me, this failure to keep pace with the leaders of thought, as they pass into oblivion.

A man's work is rather the needful supplement to himself than the outcome of it.

People seem to think there is something inherently noble and virtuous in the desire to go for a walk.

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.

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.

Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.

Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused.

Heroes are very human, most of them; very easily touched by praise.

A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.

The critic who justly admires all kinds of things simultaneously cannot love any one of them.

Admiration involves a glorious obliquity of vision.

Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie.

Fate weaves the darkness, which is perhaps why she weaves so badly.

Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.

As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality, he is immortal.

Golf: The most ... perfect expression of National Stupidity.

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.

True dandyism is the result of an artistic temperament working upon a fine body within the wide limits of fashion.

I may be old fashioned, but I am right.

When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.

Sometimes I feel that I am a natural born genius in a field of human endeavor that hasn't been invented yet

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.

Women who love the same man have a kind of bitter freemasonry.

I believe the twenty-four hour day has come to stay.

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.

Of course we all know that Morris was a wonderful all-round man, but the act of walking round him has always tired me.

By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

\'After all,\' as a pretty girl once said to me, \'women are a sex by themselves, so to speak.\'