176 Quotes by Max Beerbohm

You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself.

He had heard that whenever a woman was to blame for a disappointment, the best way to avoid a scene was to inculpate oneself.

In the hearing of the gods, who hear all, it is conversely unsafe to make a simple and direct statement.

Here was he, going to die for her; and here was she, blaming him for a breach of manners. Decidedly, the slave had the whip-hand.

What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead – so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century.

As she sat here in the bay-window of her room, she was not reviewing the splendid pageant of her past. She was a young person whose reveries never were in retrospect. For her the part was no treasury of distinct memories, all hoarded and classified, some brighter than others and more highly valued. All memories were for her but as the motes in one fused radiance that followed her and made more luminous the pathway of her future. She was always looking forward.

Because I was a pedant. I tried to ignore you, as pedants always do try to ignore any fact they cannot fit into their pet system.

It, one suspects, must have had much to do with the evocation of what is called the Oxford spirit – that gentlest spirit, so lingering and searching, so dear to them who as youths were brought into ken of it, so exasperating to them who were not. Yes, certainly, it is this mild, miasmal air, not less than the grey beauty and gravity of the buildings, that has helped Oxford to produce, and foster eternally, her peculiar race of artist-scholars, scholar-artists. The.

It is so much easier to covet what one hasn’t than to revel in what one has. Also, it is so much easier to be enthusiastic about what exists than about what doesn’t.