William Somerset Maugham Quotes
Best 60 Quotes by William Somerset Maugham – Page 1 of 2
“I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.”
“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.”
“I'll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell... their heart's in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ.”
“I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.”
“If fifty million people say something foolish, it is still foolish.”
“It wasn't until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say 'I don't know'.”
“It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.”
“Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.”
“Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.”
“Only a mediocre person is always at his best. ”
“She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.”
“The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.”
“The love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned”
“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.”
“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
“Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.”
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“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”
“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.”
“When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.”
“You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.”
Books and You Quotes
“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
Cakes and Ale Quotes
“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.”
Of Human Bondage Quotes
“He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other.”
“His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless; he was vain of the wider knowledge he had acquired from the perusal of so many books, his mind was alert, and he had not the skill to hide his contempt for his companions' stupidity.
They complained that he was conceited; and, since he excelled only in matters which to them were unimportant, they asked satirically what he had to be conceited about. He was developing a sense of humour, and found that he had a knack of saying bitter things, which caught people on the raw; he said them because they amused him, hardly realising how much they hurt, and was much offended when he found that his victims regarded him with active dislike.
The humiliations he suffered when he first went to school had caused in him a shrinking from his fellows which he could never entirely overcome; he remained shy and silent.
But though he did everything to alienate the sympathy of other boys he longed with all his heart for the popularity which to some was so easily accorded. These from his distance he admired extravagantly; and though he was inclined to be more sarcastic with them than with others, though he made little jokes at their expense, he would have given anything to change places with them.”
“I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody else's advice.”
“I have nothing but contempt for the people who despise money. They are hypocrites or fools. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off.
The only thing to be careful about is that you do not pay more than a shilling for the shilling you earn. You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer.”
“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.”
“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.
It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life.
They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.”
“It was one of the queer things of life that you saw a person every day for months and were so intimate with him that you could not imagine existence without him; then separation came, and everything went on in the same way, and the companion who had seemed essential proved unnecessary.”
“It's no good crying over spilt milk, because all the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.”
“Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.”
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“Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.”
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