176 Quotes by Max Beerbohm

Men prominent in life are mostly hard to converse with. They lack small-talk, and at the same time one doesn’t like to confront them with their own great themes.

Oh,” every stair creaked faintly, “I ought to have been marble!

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

It is the privilege of nobility to condescend.

The literary gift is a mere accident – is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as it is denied to strenuous sages.

Does the stag in his hour of victory need a diploma from the hind?

Yet often you talk as though you had read rather much. Your way of speech has what is called ‘the literary flavour’.

She was particularly struck by a remark of Aristotle’s, that tragedy was “more philosophic” than history, inasmuch as it concerned itself with what might be, while history was concerned with merely what had been.

She was one of those people who said I don’t know anything about music, but I know what I like.