176 Quotes by Max Beerbohm

Pessimism does win us great happy moments.

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.

I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect, either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.

Strange when you come to think of it, that of all countless folk who have lived on this planet, not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.

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

Great men are but life-sized. Most of them, indeed, are rather short.

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

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

The hospitable instinct is not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism mixed up with it.