W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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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Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty; the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding.
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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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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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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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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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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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Life isn't long enough for love and art.
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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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We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
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The poignancy which all beauty has.
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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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It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.
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Women are always glad to listen when you discourse upon love...
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Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.
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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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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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... 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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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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'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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What mean and cruel things men can do for the love of God.
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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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Passion doesn't count the cost. … Passion is destructive.