W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.
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Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.
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The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
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The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
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There are men whose sense of humour is so ill developed that they still bear a grudge against Copernicus because he dethroned them from the central position in the universe. They feel it a personal affront that they can no longer consider themselves the pivot upon which turns the whole of created things.
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'You bloody fool, you've killed the wrong man.'
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Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.
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There are directors who desire to be artistic. It is pathetic to compare the seriousness of their aim with the absurdity of their attainment.
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If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
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At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
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He loved her so passionately he wanted her to be one soul and one body with him; and he was conscious that here, with those deep roots attaching her to the native life, she would always keep something from him.
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I have always been convinced that if a woman once made up her mind to marry a man nothing but instant flight could save him.
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Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.
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In art honesty is not only the best but the only policy.
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Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
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Bob Forestier had pretended for so many years to be a gentleman that in the end, forgetting that it was all a fake, he had found himself driven to act as in that stupid, conventional brain of his he thought a gentleman must act. No longer knowing the difference between sham and real, he had sacrificed his life to a spurious heroism.
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Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.
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Any nation that thinks more of its ease and comfort than its freedom will soon lose its freedom; and the ironical thing about it is that it will lose its ease and comfort too.
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He made one laugh sometimes by speaking the truth, but this is a form of humour which gains its force only by its unusualness; it would cease to amuse if it were commonly practised.
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An art is only great and significant if it is one that all may enjoy. The art of a clique is but a plaything.
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Life isn't long enough for love and art.
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It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.
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It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late.
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I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice.