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The hospitable instinct is not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism mixed up with it.
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
Instinct
Pride
Hospitable
Altruistic
Egoism
Mixed
Wholly
More quotes by Max Beerbohm
The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play.
Max Beerbohm
No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.
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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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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.
Max Beerbohm
Humility is a virtue, and it is a virtue innate in guests.
Max Beerbohm
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.
Max Beerbohm
Heroes are very human, most of them very easily touched by praise.
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But to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia.
Max Beerbohm
I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
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I may be old fashioned, but I am right.
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It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality.
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I prefer that laughter shall take me unawares. Only so can it master and dissolve me.
Max Beerbohm
As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality, he is immortal.
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Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.
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Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.
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
Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.
Max Beerbohm
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.
Max Beerbohm
The literary gift is a mere accident - is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as it is denied to strenuous sages.
Max Beerbohm
Only the insane take themselves seriously.
Max Beerbohm
