W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
-
Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.
-
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.
-
She was making money. But she could not get over the idea that to earn her living was somewhat undignified, and she was inclined to remind you that she was a lady by birth.
-
I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?
-
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.
-
Has it occurred to you that transmigration is at once an explanation and a justification of the evil of the world? If the evils we suffer are the result of sins committed in our past lives, we can bear them with resignation and hope that if in this one we strive toward virtue out future lives will be less afflicted.
-
I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.
-
Was it necessary to tell me that you wanted nothing in the world but me?' The corners of his mouth drooped peevishly. Oh, my dear, it's rather hard to take quite literally the things a man says when he's in love with you.' Didn't you mean them?' At the moment.
-
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.
-
Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination; it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it.
-
The great critic … must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.
-
It needs a good deal of philosophy not to be mortified by the thought of persons who have voluntarily abandoned everything that for the most of us makes life worth living and are devoid of envy of what they have missed. I have never made up my mind whether they are fools or wise men.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Make him laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured.
-
If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be as overpopulated as it is now.
-
When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself?
-
Now the answer ... is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.
-
I happen to think we’ve set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.
-
Oh, it's always the same,' she sighed, 'if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.
-
There is no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to be able to tell you what mutton tastes like. It is enough if he eats a cutlet. But he should do that.
-
Her tears were partly tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them was gone. She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer.
-
People are always a little disconcerted when you don't recognize them, they are so important to themselves, it is a shock to discover of what small importance they are to others. [The human element]
-
As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.