W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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Men are always the same. Fear makes them cruel.
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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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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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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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Things don't get any easier by putting them off.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Perfect is determined in shortened measures of time, not over long periods of time or lifetimes. It would be unnatural.