W Somerset Maugham Quotes

The passing moment is all we can be sure of it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it.
W Somerset Maugham
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous on the contrary it makes them for the most part humble tolerant and kind. Failure makes people cruel and bitter.
W Somerset Maugham
Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.
W Somerset Maugham
We do not write as we want but as we can.
W Somerset Maugham
A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else believes.
W Somerset Maugham
We do not write as we want but as we can.
W Somerset Maugham
Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.
W Somerset Maugham
A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else believes.
W Somerset Maugham
We do not write as we want but as we can.
W Somerset Maugham
Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.
W Somerset Maugham
Money is like a sixth sense and you can't make use of the other five without it.
W Somerset Maugham
American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
W Somerset Maugham
Life isn't long enough for love and art.
W Somerset Maugham
Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
W Somerset Maugham
It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you for it was the illusion they loved.
W Somerset Maugham
The greatest tragedy of life is not that men perish but that they cease to love.
W Somerset Maugham
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
W Somerset Maugham
To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.
W Somerset Maugham
Dinner a time when . . . one should eat wisely but not too well and talk well but not too wisely.
W Somerset Maugham
There is only one thing about which I am certain and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain.
W Somerset Maugham
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
W Somerset Maugham
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
W Somerset Maugham
A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her . . . but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.
W Somerset Maugham
Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.
W Somerset Maugham
Beauty is an ecstacy it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.
W Somerset Maugham
Something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.
W Somerset Maugham
We do not write as we want but as we can.
W Somerset Maugham
A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.
W Somerset Maugham
I have great affection for you, Roy" I answered, "but I don't think you are the sort of person I'd care to have breakfast with.
W Somerset Maugham
She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her.
W Somerset Maugham
I am willing to take life as a game of chess in which the first rules are not open to discussion. No one asks why the knight is allowed his eccentric hop, why the castle may only go straight and the bishop obliquely. These things are to be accepted, and with these rule the game must be played: it is foolish to complain of them.
W Somerset Maugham
She alone had been blind to his merit. Why? Because he loved her and she did not love him. What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?
W Somerset Maugham
Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour.
W Somerset Maugham
Himself an ugly man, insignificantof appearance, he prized very highly comeliness in others.
W Somerset Maugham
Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
W Somerset Maugham
The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.
W Somerset Maugham
You say that Caesar Borgia suffered the just punishment of his crimes. He was destroyed not by his misdeeds, but by circumstances over which he had no control. His wickedness was an irrelevant accident. In this world of sin and sorrow if virtue triumphs over vice it is not because it is virtuous, but because it has better and bigger guns; if honesty prevails over double-dealing, it is not because it is honest, but because it has a stronger army more ably led; and if good overcomes evil it is not because it is good, but because it has a well-lined purse. It is well to have right on our side, but it madness to forget that unless we have might as well it will avail us nothing. We must believe that God loves men of good will, but there is no evidence to show that He will save fools from the result of their folly.
W Somerset Maugham
She’s wonderful. Tell her I’ve never seen such beautiful hands. I wonder what she sees in you.”Waddington, smiling, translated the question.“She says I’m good.”“As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue,” Kitty mocked.
W Somerset Maugham
I prefer a loose woman to a selfish one and a wanton to a fool.
W Somerset Maugham
Man's desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy (conscience) within his gates; and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd.
W Somerset Maugham
It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he should do and never by what he wanted with his whole soul to do. […] He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slopped through his fingers. His ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.
W Somerset Maugham
If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good to come nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what I am here for and how in these circumstances I must conduct myself. Now the answer to one of these questions is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for living and life has no meaning. We are here, inhabitants for a little while of a small planet, revolving around a minor star which is in turn one of unnumbered galaxies... The astronomer tells us.... this planet will eventually reach a condition when living things can no longer exist upon it and at long last the universe will attain that final state of equilibrium in which nothing more can happen. Aeons and aeons before this man will have disappeared. Is it possible to suppose that it will matter then that he ever existed? He will have been a chapter in the history of the universe as pointless as the chapter in which is written the life stories of the strange creatures that inhabited the primeval earth.
W Somerset Maugham
The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.
W Somerset Maugham
I have nothing to do with others, I am only concerned with myself. I take advantage of the fact that the majority of mankind are led by certain rewards to do things which directly or indirectly tend to my convenience.’‘It seems to me an awfully selfish way of looking at things,’ said Philip.‘But are you under the impression that men ever do anything except for selfish reasons?’‘Yes.’‘It is impossible that they should. You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognise the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life—their pleasure.
W Somerset Maugham
Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.
W Somerset Maugham
I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own entertainment.
W Somerset Maugham
The tragedy of life is that sometimes we get what we want.
W Somerset Maugham
I repeat here what you will find in my first chapter, that the only thing that signifies to you in a book is what it means to you, and if your opinion is at variance with that of everyone else in the world it is of no consequence. Your opinion is valid for you. In matters of art people, especially, I think, in America, are apt to accept willingly from professors and critics a tyranny which in matters of government they would rebel against. But in these questions there is no right and wrong. The relation between the reader and his book is as free and intimate as that between the mystic and his God. Of all forms of snobbishness the literary is perhaps the most detestable, and there is no excuse for the fool who despises his fellow-man because he does not share his opinion of the value of a certain book. Pretence in literary appreciation is odious, and no one should be ashamed if a book that the best critics think highly of means nothing to him. On the other hand it is better not to speak ill of such books if you have not read them.
W Somerset Maugham
People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.
W Somerset Maugham
Every year hundreds of books, many of considerable merit, pass unnoticed. Each one has taken the author months to write, he may have had it in his mind for years; he has put into it something of himself which is lost forever, it is heart-rending to think how great are the chances that it will be disregarded.
W Somerset Maugham
Dying is a dull, dreary affair. my advice is that you have nothing whatever to with it.
W Somerset Maugham
Benevolence is often very peremptory.
W Somerset Maugham
Patsy had asked him if he had had adventures in Paris and he had truthfully answered no. It was a fact that he had done nothing; his father thought he had had a devil of a time and was afraid he had contracted a venereal disease, and he hadn't even had a woman; only one thing had happened to him, it was rather curious when you came to think of it, and he didn't just then quite know what to do about it: the bottom had fallen out of his world.
W Somerset Maugham
There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.
W Somerset Maugham
Character? I should have thought it needed a good deal of character to throw up a career after half an hour’s meditation, because you saw in another way of living a more intense significance. And it required still more character never to regret the sudden step. I wondered if Abraham really had made a hash of life. Is to do what you most want, to live under the conditions that please you, in peace with yourself, to make a hash of life; and is it success to be an eminent surgeon with ten thousand a year and a beautiful wife? I suppose it depends on what meaning you attach to life, the claim which you acknowledge to society, and the claim of the individual. But again I held my tongue, for who am I to argue with a knight?
W Somerset Maugham
Larry sat with his arm stretched out along the top of the front seat. His shirt cuff was pulled back by his position and displayed his slim, strong wrist and the lower part of his brown arm lightly covered with fine hairs. The sun shone goldly upon them. Something in Isabel's immobility attracted my attention, and I glanced at her. She was so still that you might have thought her hypnotized. Her breath was hurried. Her eyes were fixed on the sinewy wrist with its little golden hairs and on that long, delicate, but powerful hand, and I have never seen on a human countenance such a hungry concupiscence as I saw then on hers. It was a mask of lust. I would never have believed that her beautiful features could assume an expression of such unbridled sensuality. It was animal rather than human. The beauty was stripped from her face; the look upon it made her hideous and frightening. It horribly suggested the bitch in heat and I felt rather sick.
W Somerset Maugham
I do not believe that I am a vindictive man, but when the immortal gods take a hand in the matter it is pardonable to observe the results with complacency.
W Somerset Maugham
Irony is a gift of the gods, the most subtle of all the modes of speech. It is an armour and a weapon; it is a philosophy and a perpetual entertainment; it is food for the hungry of wit and drink to those thirsting for laughter...
W Somerset Maugham
I do not like these painted faces that look all alike; and I think women are foolish to dull their expression and obscure their personality with powder, rouge, and lipstick.
W Somerset Maugham
A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.
W Somerset Maugham