W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
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We have long passed the Victorian Era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.
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It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise.
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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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The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
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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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Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
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The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
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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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'You bloody fool, you've killed the wrong man.'
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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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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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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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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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Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.
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In art honesty is not only the best but the only policy.
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Life isn't long enough for love and art.
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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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I held my breath, for to me there is nothing more awe-inspiring than when a man discovers to you the nakedness of his soul.
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There are men who are possessed by an urge so strong to do some particular thing that they can't help themselves, they've got to do it. They're prepared to sacrifice everything to satisfy their yearning.
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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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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.