W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

Bob Forestier had pretended for so many years to be a gentleman that in the end, forgetting that it was all a fake, he had found himself driven to act as in that stupid, conventional brain of his he thought a gentleman must act. No longer knowing the difference between sham and real, he had sacrificed his life to a spurious heroism.

W. Somerset Maugham

• Life
• Real
• Brain
• Stupid
• Fake
• Gentleman

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Quotes to Explore

• I'm not into things that feel like a sequel. There's just something magical about when something happens for the first time.

  

  Nathan Fielder
  • Time
  • Feel
  • First Time

• I had two sisters carried away in a chain-gang - one of them left two children. We were always uneasy.

  

  Harriet Tubman
  • Children
  • Always
  • Two

• When you watch it, you're like, Wow. I look like that. But it doesn't feel like that at all. It was about communicating with Gale Harold and getting across what I wanted to say about the character.

  

  Randy Harrison
  • Character
  • You
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• When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.

  

  Pablo Picasso
  • People
  • Die
  • Ship

• I don't believe that intelligence can be reduced to a number, frankly. But I can see how doing exactly that produces a useful sorting mechanism in our society in order to separate children into categories of promising and doomed. The tests seem arbitrary and without real scientific value and yet have lasting consequences.

  

  Rachel Kushner
  • Believe
  • Children
  • Real

• What is Norah Jones' style? Is it just the albums that we've heard? She has a rock group where she plays guitar in, downtown in New York, so do we really know her style?

  

  Talib Kweli Black Star
  • Style
  • Rock
  • Guitar

• We only have a certain amount of energy for each day. If we use it for the wrong purpose, if we focus on the negative or dwell on whoever hurt us, then we're not going to have the energy we need for the right purposes.

  

  Victoria Osteen
  • Energy
  • Day
  • Focus

• I had to start being aware of what I ate, what I'm planning to eat and take my twice-daily medication accordingly. That's not so difficult now, but when you're 10 years old, it's tough, let me tell you.

  

  Dana Hill
  • Daily
  • Start
  • Planning

• Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky - or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.

  

  Carl Sandburg
  • Time
  • Nice
  • Sky

• After the Soviet Union collapsed, people thought I wasn't funny anymore.

  

  Yakov Smirnoff
  • People
  • Funny
  • Thought

• Not a lot of people know this, but I'm very good at mathematics. When I was an angry teenager, I used to sit in my room and do quadratic equations to calm myself down.

  

  Samantha Bond
  • People
  • Good
  • Myself

• Even more than dying itself, I'm scared of the horror-movie changes that happen to the human body as it ages. I think of it as a sort of haunted-house effect, living inside a crumbling, creaking structure that is full of ghosts and will, some day, fall down.

  

  Kate Christensen
  • Movie
  • House
  • Day

• Lebanon, Israel, Ireland, South Africa - wherever there is a bleeding sore on the body of the world, the same hard-eyed narrow-minded fanatics are busy, indifferent to life, in love with death.

  

  J. M. Coetzee
  • Life
  • World
  • Love

• If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

  

  Manuel Puig
  • She
  • Study
  • Problems

• There's no one who has been living for centuries.

  

  Malala Yousafzai
  • Living
  • Been
  • Centuries

• I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.

  

  Manuel Puig
  • Great
  • Why
  • Always

• As an HR Manager, you don't have to build a top-down perks program. You decide how much you want to invest in your employees, and then you give your employees the control to build a custom perk package for themselves.

  

  Paige Craig
  • Want
  • Control
  • Employees

• I was looking for the people who were making the music inside the cabinet. I would look in there and see if I could find somebody who was making all this wonderful music.

  

  Abbey Lincoln
  • People
  • Music
  • Looking

• All I needed was the courage to be me. That courage took a lifetime to develop.

  

  James Victor Scott
  • Courage

• I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within.

  

  Pico Iyer
  • Writing
  • Understanding
  • Travel

• Let me be absolutely clear: I think it is defeatist to sort of say we want to leave the European Union. We're going to try and change the rules and change the way it works and change the objectives that it has in order to make it something that works for Britain.

  

  Philip Hammond

• I attended seminars where many social issues were discussed abstractly, outside the pressures of an immediate situation, and there I developed certain attitudes which permitted me to face the real thing when it came along.

  

  James A. Michener
  • Real

• When you come to Christ as a real young person, I think when you become a teen-ager either you rebel or you search, doubt, and wonder.

  

  Jerry B. Jenkins
  • Real
  • Wonder
  • Doubt

• Bob Forestier had pretended for so many years to be a gentleman that in the end, forgetting that it was all a fake, he had found himself driven to act as in that stupid, conventional brain of his he thought a gentleman must act. No longer knowing the difference between sham and real, he had sacrificed his life to a spurious heroism.

  

  W. Somerset Maugham
  • Life
  • Real
  • Brain