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Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.
W. Somerset Maugham -
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
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The value of culture is its effect on character. It avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens that. Its use is for life. Its aim is not beauty but goodness.
W. Somerset Maugham -
Affection is created by habit, community of interests, convenience and the desire of companionship. It is a comfort rather than an exhilaration.
W. Somerset Maugham -
I like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating.
W. Somerset Maugham -
Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, depreciating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a common room.
W. Somerset Maugham -
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.
W. Somerset Maugham -
One does not really feel much grief at other people's sorrows; one tries, and puts on a melancholy face, thinking oneself brutal for not caring more; but one cannot and it is better, for if one grieved too deeply at other people's tears, life would be unendurable; and every man has sufficient sorrows of his own without taking to heart his neighbour's.
W. Somerset Maugham
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To bear failure with courage is the best proof of character that anyone can give... You will find that people forget the failures of others very quickly.... My last piece of advice is not to let anyone see your mortification, but whatever you fancy people are saying about you to go on with your ordinary life as though nothing unpleasant had happened to you.
W. Somerset Maugham -
I am sick of this way of life. The weariness and sadness of old age make it intolerable. I have walked with death in hand, and death's own hand is warmer than my own. I don't wish to live any longer.
W. Somerset Maugham -
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.
W. Somerset Maugham -
The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel.
W. Somerset Maugham -
Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which this consists.
W. Somerset Maugham -
Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither.
W. Somerset Maugham
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It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.
W. Somerset Maugham -
Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.
W. Somerset Maugham -
And I have the sunset, and the Tuscan wine, and the white teeth of the women in Rome. I am a traveler in Romance.
W. Somerset Maugham -
You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.
W. Somerset Maugham -
Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.
W. Somerset Maugham -
I am afraid of people with too much charm. They devour you. In the end you are made a sacrifice to the exercise of their fascinating gift and their insincerity.
W. Somerset Maugham
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The normal is what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to find them all in a single man is hardly to be expected.
W. Somerset Maugham -
It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me.
W. Somerset Maugham -
The ideas for stories that thronged my brain would not let me rest till I had got rid of them by writing them.
W. Somerset Maugham -
Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe.
W. Somerset Maugham