Some people are born to lift heavy weights, some are born to juggle golden balls.
Max Beerbohm
People are either born hosts or born guests.
Max Beerbohm
Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.
Max Beerbohm
When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.
Max Beerbohm
No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.
Max Beerbohm
We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of Americans.
Max Beerbohm
It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality.
Max Beerbohm
I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.
Max Beerbohm
You will find my last words in the blue folder.
Max Beerbohm
One might well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.
Max Beerbohm
It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.
Max Beerbohm
The delicate balance between modesty and conceit is popularity.
Max Beerbohm
The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.
Max Beerbohm
Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.
Max Beerbohm
People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table.
Max Beerbohm
To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.
Max Beerbohm
No Roman ever was able to say, ‘I dined last night with the Borgias’.
Max Beerbohm
Nobody ever died of laughter.
Max Beerbohm
Humility is a virtue, and it is a virtue innate in guests.
Max Beerbohm
Most women are not as young as they are painted.
Max Beerbohm
There is much to be said for failure. It is much more interesting than success.
Max Beerbohm
Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently. Things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth.
Max Beerbohm
To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people.
Max Beerbohm
To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.
Max Beerbohm
Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.
Max Beerbohm
To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature.
Max Beerbohm
Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.
Max Beerbohm
All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.
Max Beerbohm
Of all the objects of hatred, a woman once loved is the most hateful.
Max Beerbohm
A hundred eyes were fixed on her, and half as many hearts lost to her.
Max Beerbohm
You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.
Max Beerbohm
To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme type of all that a host and hostess should not be.
Max Beerbohm
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.
Max Beerbohm
I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
Max Beerbohm
As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality, he is immortal.
Max Beerbohm