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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.

Max Beerbohm

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Max Beerbohm
Age: 83 †
Born: 1872
Born: August 24
Died: 1956
Died: May 20
Caricaturist
Comedian
Drawer
Essayist
Illustrator
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Painter
Poet
Watercolorist
Writer
London
England
Sir Max Beerbohm
Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm
Sir Beerbohm
Henry Maximilian Beerbohm
Doesn
Themes
Hard
Confront
Great
Theme
Men
Mostly
Time
Vanity
Life
Lack
Converse
Like
Small
Converses
Talk
Prominent

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Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.
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Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused.
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The one real goal of education is to leave a person asking questions.
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Of all the objects of hatred, a woman once loved is the most hateful.
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I prefer that laughter shall take me unawares. Only so can it master and dissolve me.
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Have you noticed ... there is never any third act in a nightmare? They bring you to a climax of terror and then leave you there. They are the work of poor dramatists.
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In every human being one or the other of these two instincts is predominant: the active or positive instinct to offer hospitality, the negative or passive instinct to accept it. And either of these instincts is so significant of character that one might as well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.
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Nobody ever died of laughter.
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True dandyism is the result of an artistic temperament working upon a fine body within the wide limits of fashion.
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For people who like that kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they like.
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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.
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It distresses me, this failure to keep pace with the leaders of thought, as they pass into oblivion.
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The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play.
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Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.
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Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie.
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Only the insane take themselves seriously.
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The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.
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After all, as a pretty girl once said to me, women are a sex by themselves, so to speak.
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The hospitable instinct is not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism mixed up with it.
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