“ Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs. 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
“ Yet often you talk as though you had read rather much. Your way of speech has what is called ‘the literary flavour’. Max Beerbohm
“ One is taught to refrain from irony, because mankind does tend to take it literally. In the hearing of the gods, who hear all, it is conversely unsage to make a simple and direct statement. So what is… Max Beerbohm
“ Here was he, going to die for her; and here was she, blaming him for a breach of manners. Decidedly, the slave had the whip-hand. Max Beerbohm
“ He was too much concerned with his own perfection ever to think of admiring any one else. Max Beerbohm
“ Explain yourself! he commanded.Isn't that rather much for a man to ask of a woman?I don't know. I have no experience of women. In the abstract, it seems to me that every man has aright to some explana… Max Beerbohm
“ Not for an instant did he flinch from the mere fact of dying to-day…To die ‘untimely,’ as men called it, was the timeliest of deaths for one who had carved his youth to greatness. What perfection coul… Max Beerbohm
“ History,' it has been said, 'does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another. Max Beerbohm
“ The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end. 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
“ You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself. Max Beerbohm
“ Our hero's unreasoning rage was fed by a not unreasonable jealousy. It was clear to him that Zuleika had forgotten his existence. To-day, as soon as he had killed her love, she had shown him how much… Max Beerbohm
“ It, one suspects, must have had much to do with the evocation of what is called the Oxford spirit—that gentlest spirit, so lingering and searching, so dear to them who as youths were brought into ken… Max Beerbohm
“ If a man carry his sense of proportion far enough, lo! he is back at the point from which he started. He knows that eternity, as conceived by him, is but an instant in eternity, and infinity but a spe… Max Beerbohm
“ But the loveliest face in all the world will not please you if you see it suddenly, eye to eye, at a distance of half an inch from your own. Max Beerbohm
