W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
Most popular W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
Impropriety is the soul of wit.
Genius is talent provided with ideals.
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
Life isn't long enough for love and art.
The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
People seek but one thing in life — their pleasure.
The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.
The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.
Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.
It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.
When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right.
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing his mind.
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.
You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.
Self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion.
The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.
You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.
Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.
Money is like a sixth sense — and you can't make use of the other five without it.
Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more than the opium of an intelligentsia.
Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom.
Common sense and nature will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult.
Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story.
They should always be stirred so that the molecules lie sensuously on top of one another.
A good style should show no sign of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.
At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so.
When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.
It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humor.
Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.
Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willingly avoids the sight of distress.
He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind.
Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
There is only one thing about which I am certain, and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain.
You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery as soon as possible.
The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down hill.
A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her...but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.
It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony.
Art...is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.
My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.
It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people and the only thing is to face it.
It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth.
She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious.
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
I refuse to make a hierarchy of human actions and ascribe worthiness to some and ill-repute to others. The terms vice and virtue have no significance for me. I do not confer praise or blame: I accept.
From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistical and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel.
When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch's statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
If to look truth in the face and not resent it when it is unpalatable, and take human nature as you find it, smiling when it's absurd and grieved without exaggeration when it's pitiful, is to be cynical, then I suppose I'm a cynic.
Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.
I promised myself that if I ever had some money that I would savor a cigar each day after lunch and after dinner. This is the only resolution of my youth that I have kept, and the only realized ambition which has not brought dissolution.
Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of habit.
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of habit.
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind.
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people cruel and bitter.
