176 Quotes by Max Beerbohm

The moon, like a gardenia in the night’s button-hole—but no! why should a writer never be able to mention the moon without likening her to something else—usually something to which she bears not the faintest resemblance?... The moon, looking like nothing whatsoever but herself, was engaged in her old and futile endeavour to mark the hours correctly on the sun-dial at the centre of the lawn.

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

I utilise all my spare moments. I've read twenty-seven of the Hundred Best Books. I collect ferns.

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

To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.

It was Milton,” he certificatively added, “who converted me to diabolism.”“Diabolism? Oh, yes? Really?” said I, with that vague discomfort and that intense desire to be polite which one feels when a man speaks of his own religion. “You—worship the devil?”Soames shook his head. “It’s not exactly worship,” he qualified, sipping his absinthe. “It’s more a matter of trusting and encouraging.

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

The reading-room?"“Of the British Museum. I go there every day.”“You do? I've only been there once. I'm afraid I found it rather a depressing place. It—it seemed to sap one's vitality.""It doe. That's why I go there. The lower one's vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art.

Explain yourself!" he commanded."Isn't that rather much for a man to ask of a woman?""I don't know. I have no experience of women. In the abstract, it seems to me that every man has aright to some explanation from the woman who has ruined his life." (page 90)