W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
Genius is talent provided with ideals. Genius starves while talent wears purple and fine linen. The man of genius of today will infifty years' time be in most cases no more than a man of talent.
-
Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.
-
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.
-
But who can fathom the subtleties of the human heart? Certainly not those who expect from it only decorous sentiments and normal emotions.
-
The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.
-
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.
-
They say a woman always remembers her first lover with affection; but perhaps she does not always remember him.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Men are always the same. Fear makes them cruel.
-
The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.
-
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.
-
I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating.
-
The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.
-
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.
-
Art... is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
-
Life is really very fantastic, and one has to have a peculiar sense of humour to see the fun of it. [Virtue]
-
Religion is...a conspiracy of...priests to gain control over the people...
-
…the future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.