176 Quotes by Max Beerbohm

Beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied....

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

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.