W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.
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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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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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A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.
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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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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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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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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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The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willing avoids the sight of distress.
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You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.
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Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.
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We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us.
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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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There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
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Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it's a mistake to make a habit out of it.
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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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'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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Almost all the people who have had most effect on me I seem to have met by chance.
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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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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.
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The crown of literature is poetry.
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Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.
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The sad Don Quixote of a worthless purpose.