W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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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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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Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.
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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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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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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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We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.
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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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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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An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.
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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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When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.
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She had a very agreeable smile; it did not light up her face suddenly, but seemed rather to suffuse it by degrees with charm. It hesitated for a moment about her lips and then slowly travelled to those great shining eyes of hers and there softly lingered.
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Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.
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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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He knew that all things human are transitory and therefore that it must cease one day or another. He looked forward to that day with eager longing. Love was like a parasite in his heart, nourishing a hateful existence on his life's blood; it absorbed his existence so intensely that he could take pleasure in nothing else.
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The poignancy which all beauty has.
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Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
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... the Eternal turned his attention to the three shades who stood humbly and yet hopefully before him. The quick, with so short a time to live, when they talk of themselves, talk too much; but the dead, with eternity before them, are so verbose that only angels could listen to them with civility.
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It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late.
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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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I thought I should be a fool to allow work to interfere with a delight in the passing moment that I might never enjoy again so fully.
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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 might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.