Max Beerbohm
Max Beerbohm
Sir Henry Maximilian "Max" Beerbohmwas an English essayist, parodist, and caricaturist. He first became known in the 1890s as a dandy and a humorist. He was the drama critic for the Saturday Review from 1898 until 1910, when he relocated to Rapallo, Italy. In his later years he was popular for his occasional radio broadcasts. Among his best-known works is his only novel, Zuleika Dobson, published in 1911. His caricatures, drawn usually in pen or pencil with muted watercolour tinting,...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionActor
Date of Birth24 August 1872
Not that I had any special reason for hating school. Strange as it may seem to my readers, I was not unpopular there. I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.
"After all," as a pretty girl once said to me, "women are a sex by themselves, so to speak."
Sometimes I feel that I am a natural born genius in a field of human endeavor that hasn't been invented yet
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.
There is in the human race some dark spirit of recalcitrance, always pulling us in the direction contrary to that in which we are reasonably expected to go.
Improvisation is the essence of good talk. Heaven defend us from the talker who doles out things prepared for us; but let heaven not less defend us from the beautiful spontaneous writer who puts his trust in the inspiration of the moment.
It is a part of English hypocrisy or English reserve, that whilst we are fluent enough in grumbling about small inconveniences, we insist on making light of any great difficulties or grief's that may beset us.
Humility is a virtue, and it is a virtue innate in guests.
It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality.
I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.
One might well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.
We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of Americans.
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.