W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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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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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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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Charm and nothing but charm at last grows a little tiresome. It's a relief then to deal with a man who isn't quite so delightful but a little more sincere.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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Things don't get any easier by putting them off.
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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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But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
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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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When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.
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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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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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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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Self-doubt, which is the artist’s bitterest enemy.
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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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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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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.