“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.”
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)
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Max Beerbohm 36
English writer 1872–1956Related quotes

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.

“That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.”
Getting to know the General (1984)

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

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Ideal, p. 161

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Source: 1910s, Proposed Roads To Freedom (1918), Ch. VI: International relations, p. 97

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 Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.