Max Beerbohm

“ It is always about the thing that we love most that we talk most. About this thing, therefore, our errors are something more than our deepest errors: they are our most frequent errors. That is why for nearly two thousand years mankind has been more glaringly wrong on the subject of Christmas than on any other subject. If mankind had hated Christmas, he would have understood it from the first. ”

“ I look for the time when we shall wish one another a Merry Christmas every morning; when roast turkey and plum pudding shall be the staple of our daily dinner, and the holly shall never be taken down from the walls, and everyone will always be kissing everyone else under the mistletoe. ”

“ We might go further still, and say, Love is dumb. But that would be a profound and obvious lie. For Love is always an extraordinarily fluent talker. Love is a wind-bag, filled with a gusty wind from Heaven. ”

“ We do not say of Love that he is short-sighted. We do not say of Love that he is myopic. We do not say of Love that he is astigmatic. We say, quite simply, Love is blind. We might go further, and say, Love is deaf. ”

“ Suppose he asked us to accompany him to the nearest music-shop, and there purchased a guitar in order that he might worthily sing to us the radiant beauty and the radiant goodness of isosceles triangles. As men, we should, I hope, respect his enthusiasm, and encourage his enthusiasm, and catch his enthusiasm. But as seekers after truth, we should be compelled to regard with a dark suspicion, and to check with the most anxious care, every fact that he told us about isosceles triangles. For adoration involves a glorious obliquity of vision. ”

“ Blatchford and his friends seem to me to miss the basic principle that lies at the root of all things human and divine. By the way, not all things that are divine are human. But all things that are human are divine. But to return to Christmas. ”

“ Now, since it is human to err, it is always in reference to those things which arouse in us the most human of all our emotions—I mean the emotion of love—that we conceive the deepest of our errors. Suppose we met Euclid on Battersea Bridge, and he took us aside and confessed to us that whilst he regarded parallelograms and rhomboids with an indifference bordering on contempt, for isosceles triangles he cherished a wild romantic devotion. ”

“ For that which is hated, and therefore is persecuted, and therefore grows brave. lives on for ever, whilst that which is understood dies in the moment of our understanding of it—dies, as it were, in our awful grasp. ”