W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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Has it occurred to you that transmigration is at once an explanation and a justification of the evil of the world? If the evils we suffer are the result of sins committed in our past lives, we can bear them with resignation and hope that if in this one we strive toward virtue out future lives will be less afflicted.
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I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?
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You've been brought up like a gentleman and a Christian, and I should be false to the trust laid upon me by your dead father and mother if I allowed you to expose yourself to such temptation.' Well, I know I'm not a Christian and I'm beginning to doubt whether I'm a gentleman,' said Philip.
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It's always difficult to make conversation with a drunk, and there's no denying it, the sober are at a disadvantage with him.
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Advice to first year medical students: In anatomy, it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.
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There is no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to be able to tell you what mutton tastes like. It is enough if he eats a cutlet. But he should do that.
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In religion above all things the only thing of use is an objective truth. The only God that is of use is a being who is personal, supreme and good, and whose existence is as certain as that two and two make four.
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Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination; it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it.
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Oh, it's always the same,' she sighed, 'if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.
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All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
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The great critic … must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.
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Yet magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.
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Make him laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured.
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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.
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A good story is obviously a difficult thing to invent, but its difficulty is a poor reason for despising it.
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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.
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The modern clergyman has acquired in his study of the science which I believe is called exegesis an astonishing facility for explaining things away.
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When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself?
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As we grow older we become more conscious of the complexity, incoherence, and unreasonableness of human beings; this indeed is the only excuse that offers for the middle-aged or elderly writer whose thoughts should more properly be turned to graver matters, occupying himself with the trivial concerns of imaginary people.
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In heaven, when the blessed use the telephone they will say what they have to say and not a word besides.
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People are always a little disconcerted when you don't recognize them, they are so important to themselves, it is a shock to discover of what small importance they are to others. [The human element]
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Now the answer ... is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.
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Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experience he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours' relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey.
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The worst of having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were acting naturally or being tactful too. [The human element]