Max Beerbohm Quotes

Then I obviously didn't understand what it all meant, but I do now.

I think the purpose of the writer is to help us see. The writer is someone who can perhaps have the joy of helping others see.

Truth makes on the ocean of nature no one track of light; every eye, looking on, finds its own.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

It's always good news when you're closer to the truth.

I don't think ignorance is a way that you gain distance on something.

The dark is light enough.

I'm actually a great fan of lucidity.

But it is true that sometimes an enveloping darkness aids one to clearer vision; as in a panorama building, for example, where the obscurity about the entrance prepares one better for the climax, and gives the scene depicted a more real and vivid appearance.

Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.

Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

This time next year,—this time ten years,—this time one hundred years,—probably it will be just as easy as we think it is to understand that glass of water, which now seems so plain and simple. I cannot doubt but that these things, which now seem to us so mysterious, will be no mysteries at all; that the scales will fall from our eyes; that we shall learn to look on things in a different way—when that which is now a difficulty will be the only commonsense and intelligible way of looking at the subject

Learn to see a problem from a higher level of understanding. Then, it dissolves before your eyes.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

Seeing the bigger picture opens your eyes to what is the truth.

There's a lot of clarity in hindsight.

And so he who looks down at his feet will not know the truth, but he who discerns by the sun which way to go.

I cut through the nonsense with the blinding light of truth.

He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.

Sometimes it is easier to see the light when you stand partly in the darkness.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.

The best designers in the world all squint when they look at something. They squint to see the forest from the trees - to find the right balance. Squint at the world. You will see more, by seeing less.

Intelligence complicates. Wisdom simplifies.

Light itself is a great corrective. A thousand wrongs and abuses that are grown in darkness disappear, like owls and bats, before the light of day.

He who thus considers things in their first growth and origin ... will obtain the clearest view of them.