W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
-
I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.
-
I know that you're selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know that you haven't the nerve of a rabbit, I know you're a liar and a humbug, I know that you're utterly contemptible. And the tragic part is'--her face was on a sudden distraught with pain--'the tragic part is that notwithstanding I love you with all my heart.
-
We find things beautiful because we recognize them and contrariwise we find things beautiful because their novelty surprises us.
-
Things don't get any easier by putting them off.
-
Life is really very fantastic, and one has to have a peculiar sense of humour to see the fun of it. [Virtue]
-
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.
-
Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.
-
The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.
-
There are many foolish people in the world and when a man in a rather high position puts on no frills, slaps them on the back, and tells them he'll do anything in the world for them, they are very likely to think him clever.
-
Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it's the whole of life. It's an insignificant part.
-
But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
-
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.
-
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.
-
It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony.
-
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.
-
As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.
-
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.
-
I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.
-
People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force; and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.
-
Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.
-
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.
-
The Riviera isn't only a sunny place for shady people.
-
No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.
-
We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.