W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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You will have to learn many tedious things,...which you will forget the moment you have passed your final examination, but in anatomy it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.
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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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We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.
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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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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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An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.
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She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her.
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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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They say a woman always remembers her first lover with affection; but perhaps she does not always remember him.
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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 like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating.
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We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house.
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Men are always the same. Fear makes them cruel.
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…the future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.
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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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Art... is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
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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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We find things beautiful because we recognize them and contrariwise we find things beautiful because their novelty surprises us.
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I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.
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When we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.
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I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos.
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There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.
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The life force is vigorous. The delight that accompanies it counter-balances all the pains and hardships that confront men. It makes life worth living.
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The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.