“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.”

—  Max Beerbohm

Hosts and Guests (1918), Harper's Monthly ( August 1919 http://books.google.com/books?id=H2Q2AQAAMAAJ&q=%22Mankind+is+divisible+into+two+great+classes+hosts+and+guests%22&pg=PA425#v=onepage)
And Even Now http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/evnow10.txt (1920)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "In every human being one or the other of these two instincts is predominant: the active or positive instinct to offer h…" by Max Beerbohm?
Max Beerbohm photo
Max Beerbohm 36
English writer 1872–1956

Related quotes

Louis Althusser photo
Scott McCloud photo

“Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.”

Scott McCloud (1960) American cartoonist

Source: Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

Walter Dill Scott photo

“Goods offered as means of gaining social prestige make their appeals to one of the most profound of the human instincts.”

Walter Dill Scott (1869–1955) President of Northwestern university and psychologist

Source: Influencing men in business, 1911, p. 133
Context: Goods offered as means of gaining social prestige make their appeals to one of the most profound of the human instincts. In monarchies this instinct is regarded as a mere tendency to imitate royalty. In America, with no such excuse, the eagerness with which we attempt to secure merchandise used by the "swell and swagger" is absurd, but it makes it possible for the advertiser to secure more responses than might otherwise be possible.. As an illustration of this fact we need but to look at the successful advertisements of clothing, automobiles, etc. The quality of the goods themselves does not seem to be so important as the apparent prestige given by the possession of the goods.

Graham Greene photo

“That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.”

Graham Greene (1904–1991) English writer, playwright and literary critic

Getting to know the General (1984)

Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo

“Instinct is blind;—a consciousness without insight. Freedom, as the opposite of Instinct, is thus seeing, and clearly conscious of the grounds of its activity.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 7

J. Howard Moore photo
Pierre Bonnard photo

“My first pictures were done by instinct, the others with more method perhaps. Instinct which nourishes method can often be superior to a method which nourishes instinct.”

Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) French painter and printmaker

quoted by his brother-in-law Claude Terrasse, in 'Introduction' of Pierre Bonnard, John Rewald; MoMA - distribution Simon & Schuster, New York, 1918

Henry Adams photo
Bertrand Russell photo
C.G. Jung photo

“The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness.”

Source: Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), p. 69
Context: The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.

Related topics