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Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

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
Mainspring
Incongruity
Laughter
Joy
Happiness

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The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play.
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A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.
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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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I am a Tory anarchist. I should like everyone to go about doing just as he pleased - short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.
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I prefer that laughter shall take me unawares. Only so can it master and dissolve me.
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People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table.
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All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.
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The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.
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It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality.
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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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Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.
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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.
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There is in the human race some dark spirit of recalcitrance, always pulling us in the direction contrary to that in which we are reasonably expected to go.
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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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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.
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Women who love the same man have a kind of bitter freemasonry.
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The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.
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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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After all, as a pretty girl once said to me, women are a sex by themselves, so to speak.
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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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