176 Quotes by Max Beerbohm

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

When the day came for her departure, the city wore such an air of sullen mourning as it had not worn since the Prussians marched to its Elysee.

And Americans, individually, are of all people the most anxious to please. That they talk overmuch is often taken as a sign of self-satisfaction. It is merely a mannerism. Rhetoric is a thing inbred in them. They are quite unconscious of it.

I am a Tory anarchist. I should like everyone to go about doing just as he pleased – short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.

The lower one’s vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art.

You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men. For the attractive woman, dogs are mere dumb and restless brutes – possibly dangerous, certainly soulless. Yet will coquetry teach her to caress any dog in the presence of a man enslaved by her.

There is much virtue in a window. It is to a human being as a frame is to a painting, as a proscenium to a play, as ‘form’ to literature. It strongly defines its content.

Sometimes I feel that I am a natural born genius in a field of human endeavor that hasn’t been invented yet.

To slur and sully, to belittle and drag down – that was what the world always tried to do.