Max Beerbohm Quotes
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The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.
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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.
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Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.
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To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.
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Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.
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People are either born hosts or born guests.
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You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.
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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.
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He was too much concerned with his own perfection ever to think of admiring any one else.
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You will find my last words in the blue folder.
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Lift latch, step in, be welcome, Sir,Albeit to see you I’m unglad.
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I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.
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One might well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.
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No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.
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Humility is a virtue, and it is a virtue innate in guests.
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People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table.
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The delicate balance between modesty and conceit is popularity.
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Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently. Things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth.
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Oxford walls have a way of belittling us; and the Duke was loath to regard his doom as trivial. Aye, by all minerals we are mocked. Vegetables, yearly deciduous, are far more sympathetic.
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A hundred eyes were fixed on her, and half as many hearts lost to her.
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It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality.
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The most perfect caricature is that which, on a small surface, with the simplest means, most accurately exaggerates, to the highest point, the peculiarities of a human being, at his most characteristic moment in the most beautiful manner.
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The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.
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To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme type of all that a host and hostess should not be.