It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality.
—Max Beerbohm
No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.
—Max Beerbohm
Topics: Work, Sacrifice
Nobody ever died of laughter.
—Max Beerbohm
Topics: Laughter
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
Topics: Beauty
To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.
—Max Beerbohm
Topics: Charity, Kindness, Service, Giving, Gift
Only the insane take themselves quite seriously.
—Max Beerbohm
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
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
Topics: Vanity
I was a modest, good-humored boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
—Max Beerbohm
Topics: Education, Universities, Colleges
By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.
—Max Beerbohm
Topics: Writing
To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.
—Max Beerbohm
Topics: Historians, History
Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie.
—Max Beerbohm
Topics: Money
The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.
—Max Beerbohm
Topics: Reflection, Past
They were a tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, weren’t they?
—Max Beerbohm
One might well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.
—Max Beerbohm
Topics: Mankind, Man
She was one of those people who said “I don’t know anything about music, but I know what I like.”
—Max Beerbohm
Topics: Music
Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.
—Max Beerbohm
The dullard’s envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.
—Max Beerbohm
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Greatness
How many charming talents have been spoiled by the instilled desire to do ‘important’ work! Some people are born to lift heavy weights. Some are born to juggle with golden balls.
—Max Beerbohm
Topics: Sports
The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.
—Max Beerbohm
Topics: Conscience
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.
—Max Beerbohm
Topics: Opportunities, Reality, Genius
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
Topics: Genius
There is much to be said for failure. It is more interesting than success.
—Max Beerbohm
Old friends are generally the refuge of unsociable persons.
—Max Beerbohm
Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.
—Max Beerbohm
Topics: Mediocrity
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Douglas Adams British Author
Peter Ustinov British Actor, Playwright
Herbert Beerbohm Tree English Actor-Manager
Robert Ranke Graves British Writer
Ford Madox Ford English Novelist, Poet, Critic
J. B. Priestley British Novelist, Playwright, Essayist
Stephen Spender English Poet, Critic
Anthony Hope English Author
Arthur Wing Pinero English Playwright
Richard Steele Irish Writer, Journalist