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 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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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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But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
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Culture is not just an ornament; it is the expression of a nation's character, and at the same time it is a powerful instrument to mould character. The end of culture is right living.
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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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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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Men are always the same. Fear makes them cruel.
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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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Self-doubt, which is the artist’s bitterest enemy.
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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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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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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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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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The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.
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Of course it was cause and effect, but in the necessity with which follows the other lay all tragedy of life.
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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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Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.
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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 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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But who can fathom the subtleties of the human heart? Certainly not those who expect from it only decorous sentiments and normal emotions.
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When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.
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There is no cruelty greater than a woman's to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an insane irritation.
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The first duty of a woman is to be pretty, the second is to be well-groomed, and the third is never to contradict.