W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
-
For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.
→ -
It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.
→ -
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 the hill.
→ -
Man's desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy (conscience) within his gates; and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd.
→ -
The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.
→ -
It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.
→ -
Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.
→ -
As the cosmos are in place, so be it with your life.
→ -
The inclination to digress is human. But the dramatist must avoid it even more strenuously than the saint must avoid sin, for while sin may be venial, digression is mortal.
→ -
Perfect is determined in shortened measures of time, not over long periods of time or lifetimes. It would be unnatural.
→ -
It was like making a blunder at a party; there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it.
→ -
When a man's in love, he at once makes a pedestal of the Ten Commandments and stands on the top of them with his arms akimbo. When a woman's in love she doesn't care two straws for Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not.
→ -
The essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity.
→ -
The normal is what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to find them all in a single man is hardly to be expected.
→ -
The Riviera isn't only a sunny place for shady people.
→ -
The great critic … must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.
→ -
She [Sadie Thompson] gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer. "You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!"
→ -
Vaguely, as when you are studying a foreign language and read a page which at first you can make nothing of, till a word or a sentence gives you a clue; and on a sudden suspicion, as it were, of the sense flashes across your troubled wits, vaguely she gained an inkling into the workings of Walter's mind. It was like a dark and ominous landscape seen by a flash of lightning and in a moment hidden again by the night. She shuddered at what she saw.
→ -
Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.
→ -
There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood.
→ -
She had no mercy. He looked at her neck and thought how he would like to jab it with the knife he had for his muffin. He knew enough anatomy to make pretty certain of getting the carotid artery. And at the same time he wanted to cover her pale, thin face with kisses.
→ -
Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.
→ -
Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither.
→ -
A man filled with meat turns his back on the dry bones of political doctrine. Fanatical devotion to the ruling party comes more readily from the materially deprived At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
→ -
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.
→ -
A woman may be as wicked as she likes, but if she isn't pretty it won't do her much good.
→ -
It does the heart good to look at you.
→ -
To bear failure with courage is the best proof of character that anyone can give... You will find that people forget the failures of others very quickly.... My last piece of advice is not to let anyone see your mortification, but whatever you fancy people are saying about you to go on with your ordinary life as though nothing unpleasant had happened to you.
→ -
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
→ -
For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay.
→
W. Somerset Maugham
- Born: January 25, 1874
- Died: December 16, 1965
- Occupation: Playwright
Related Authors
-
Paul Gauguin Artist -
George Bernard Shaw Playwright -
F. Scott Fitzgerald Author -
Mark Twain Author -
Evelyn Waugh Writer -
William Faulkner Writer -
Herbert Marshall Actor -
Thomas Hardy Novelist -
Erich Maria Remarque Author -
Guy de Maupassant Writer -
Rabindranath Tagore Author -
George Orwell Novelist -
Joseph Conrad Author -
John Galsworthy Novelist -
Ernest Hemingway Author -
D. H. Lawrence Novelist -
Graham Greene Writer -
Daphne du Maurier Author -
Eric Ambler Author -
Rudyard Kipling Writer