W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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Women are always glad to listen when you discourse upon love...
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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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In art honesty is not only the best but the only policy.
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What mean and cruel things men can do for the love of God.
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She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious.
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It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.
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'I sometimes think,' said the Eternal, 'that the stars never shine more brightly than when reflected in the muddy waters of a wayside ditch.'
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He was the kind of man with whom one would have hesitated to pass a lonely evening, but with whom one might cheerfully have looked forward to spending six months.
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We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.
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It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.
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It is very natural that clever young men should be rather odious. They are conscious of gifts that they do not know how to use. They are exasperated with the world that will not recognize their merit. They have something to give, and no hand is stretched out to receive it. They are impatient for the fame they regard as their due.
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He had a bitter pain in his heart, for he knew that she was still a stranger to him and his hungry love was destined ever to remain unsatisfied.
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Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.
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People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
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Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
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There is only one thing about which I am certain, and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain.
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It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late.
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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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The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.
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Passion doesn't count the cost. … Passion is destructive.
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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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Love is not always blind and there are few things that cause greater wretchedness than to love with all your heart someone who you know is unworthy of love.
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She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer. 'You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!'
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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.