W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic.
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It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony.
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Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.
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Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.
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There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth of the valley.
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Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.
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But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
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The value of money is that with it we can tell any man to go to the devil. It is the sixth sense which enables you to enjoy the other five.
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Throw yourself into the hurly-burly of life. It doesn't matter how many mistakes you make, what unhappiness you have to undergo. It is all your material ... Don't wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material.
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Men are always the same. Fear makes them cruel.
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It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.
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When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.
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He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
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There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed.
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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 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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Things don't get any easier by putting them off.
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The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain, just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes.
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Self-doubt, which is the artist’s bitterest enemy.
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Charm and nothing but charm at last grows a little tiresome. It's a relief then to deal with a man who isn't quite so delightful but a little more sincere.
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The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account.
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I am a little shy of any assumption of moral indignation. There is always in it an element of self-satisfaction which makes it awkward to anyone who has a sense of humour.
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I did not then know the besetting sin of woman, the passion to discuss her private affairs with anyone who is willing to listen.
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Perfect is determined in shortened measures of time, not over long periods of time or lifetimes. It would be unnatural.