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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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.
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Religion is...a conspiracy of...priests to gain control over the people...
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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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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.
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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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We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.
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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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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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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 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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…the future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.
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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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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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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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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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Men are always the same. Fear makes them cruel.
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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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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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They say a woman always remembers her first lover with affection; but perhaps she does not always remember him.
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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 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 rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.
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Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence.