W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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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No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.
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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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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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We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing, too
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We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.
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If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.
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She says it's really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate.
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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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No woman is worth more than a fiver unless you're in love with her. Then she's worth all she costs you.
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Art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach man humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action.
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Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence.
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But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design.
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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 was once a professor of law who said to his students. When you are fighting a case, if you have facts on your side hammer them into the jury, and if you have the law on your side hammer it into the judge. But if you have neither the facts nor the law, asked one of his listeners? Then hammer the hell into the table, answered the professor.
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There is no more merit in being able to attach a correct description to a picture than in being able to find out what is wrong with a stalled motorcar. In each case it is special knowledge.
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You cannot write well or much (and I venture the opinion that you cannot write well unless you write much) unless you form a habit.
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A novelist must preserve a childlike belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence.
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There are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity. I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?
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Evil can be condoned only if in the beyond it is compensated by good and god himself needs immortality to vindicate his ways to man.
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The mathematician who after seeing Phedre asked: 'Qu'est que ca prouve?' was not such a fool as he has been generally made out. No one has ever been able to explain why the Doric temple of Paestum is more beautiful than a glass of cold beer except by bringing in considerations that have nothing to do with beauty.
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As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.
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The average American can get into the kingdom of heaven much more easily than he can get into the Boulevard St. Germain.
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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.