Geoffrey Madan

Geoffrey Spencer Madan (6 February 1895 – 6 July 1947) was an English belletrist, and a collector and creator of aphorisms, many of which are recorded in his Notebooks.

Biography Geoffrey Spencer Madan was born on 6 February 1895, in Oxford, the son of Falconer Madan, a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford and Bodley's Librarian, and Frances Jane Hayter. He had a sister, Ethel, who married Charles Fox Burney.

He was educated at Summer Fields School, Oxford, Eton College (to which he won the top scholarship in 1907) and Balliol College, Oxford. While still at school he earned a day's holiday for the whole school by the excellence of his account of Eton written in Herodotean Greek, and embarked on a correspondence and friendship with A. C. Benson. Madan went up to Balliol College in 1913. There he read Classics, and he made a number of lifelong friends, including Harold Macmillan, Cyril Asquith and Ronald Knox.

Madan died suddenly in London on 6 July 1947, called the Notebooks "the best example of a twentieth-century Commonplace book".

Examples of his published aphorisms include: "The dust of exploded beliefs may make a fine sunset". "Alive, in the sense that he can't legally be buried." "Never assume that habitual silence means ability in reserve."