W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I do not believe they are right who say that the defects of famous men should be ignored. I think it is better that we should know them. Then, though we are conscious of having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe that that is no hindrance to our achieving also something of their virtues.
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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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When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.
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But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
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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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D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.
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Life is really very fantastic, and one has to have a peculiar sense of humour to see the fun of it. [Virtue]
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Men are always the same. Fear makes them cruel.
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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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Perfect is determined in shortened measures of time, not over long periods of time or lifetimes. It would be unnatural.
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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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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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It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.