W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world.
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For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.
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We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us.
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You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.
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It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.
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You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.
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Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
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He found himself now in the agreeable situation of being able to do what was best for others and at the same time what was convenient to himself.
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It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
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Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
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The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willing avoids the sight of distress.
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No egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul.
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She had no mercy. He looked at her neck and thought how he would like to jab it with the knife he had for his muffin. He knew enough anatomy to make pretty certain of getting the carotid artery. And at the same time he wanted to cover her pale, thin face with kisses.
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I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere, how much baseness in the noble, or how much goodness in the reprobate.
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Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.
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Have common sense and stick to the point.
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My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.
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The sad Don Quixote of a worthless purpose.
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Almost all the people who have had most effect on me I seem to have met by chance.
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'A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her,' he said, 'but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.'
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I'll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell... their heart's in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ.
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It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.
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Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
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I reflected, while I chatted with the woman I had been asked to ‘take in’, that civilized man practises a strange ingenuity in wasting on tedious exercises the brief span of his life.