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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
Incongruity
Laughter
Joy
Happiness
Mainspring

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The one real goal of education is to leave a person asking questions.
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The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play.
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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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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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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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I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
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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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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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It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality.
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A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.
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Strange when you come to think of it, that of all countless folk who have lived on this planet, not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.
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I may be old fashioned, but I am right.
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A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.
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Death cancels all engagements.
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Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.
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But to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia.
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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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People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table.
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The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.
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The hospitable instinct is not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism mixed up with it.
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