Top 100 W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
#1. Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.
W. Somerset Maugham
#3. Man has always found it easier to sacrifice his life than to learn the multiplication table.
W. Somerset Maugham
#5. Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.
W. Somerset Maugham
#6. The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel.
W. Somerset Maugham
#7. No woman is worth more than a fiver unless you're in love with her. Then she's worth all she costs you.
W. Somerset Maugham
#11. We were staggered and immediately on the defensive, for she looked intellectual, and it made us feel shy.
W. Somerset Maugham
#12. I do not know what put the idea of China into his head, but at first he must have thrust it aside with violent repulsion; and perhaps the very violence of his repulsion impressed the idea on him, for he found it haunting him.
W. Somerset Maugham
#13. He lit his pipe again, smiling to himself quietly, with that painful smile of his, as though he were enjoying a joke that hurt him.
W. Somerset Maugham
#15. I have great affection for you, Roy" I answered, "but I don't think you are the sort of person I'd care to have breakfast with.
W. Somerset Maugham
#16. In the midst of life we are in death
one can never tell what may happen.
W. Somerset Maugham
#17. Grief she could not feel, for there had been too much bitterness between her mother and herself to leave in her heart any deep feeling of affection; and looking back on the girl she had been she knew that it was her mother who had made her what she was.
W. Somerset Maugham
#18. A virtue that only causes havoc and unhappiness is worth nothing. You can call it virtue if you like. I call it cowardice.
W. Somerset Maugham
#19. But every well has a bottom and finally your friend will come to the end of what he has to tell you:
W. Somerset Maugham
#20. Failure make people bitter and cruel. Success improves the character of the man.
W. Somerset Maugham
#21. Self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion ...
W. Somerset Maugham
#22. We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.
W. Somerset Maugham
#23. I wanted to live again and again. I was willing to accept every sort of life, no matter what its pain and sorrow; I felt that only life after life, life after life could satisfy my eagerness, my vigour, and my curiosity.
W. Somerset Maugham
#24. I'm only twenty-five. If I've made a mistake I have time to correct it.
W. Somerset Maugham
#25. I don't ask you to forgive me. I don't ask you to love me as you used to love me. But couldn't we be friends?
W. Somerset Maugham
#27. You're beginning to dislike me, aren't you? Well, dislike me. It doesn't make any difference to me now.
W. Somerset Maugham
#28. To the acute observer no one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.
W. Somerset Maugham
#29. There is no cruelty greater than a woman's to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an insane irritation.
W. Somerset Maugham
#30. Schools are made for the average. The holes are all round, and whatever shape the pegs are they must wedge in somehow. One hasn't time to bother about anything but the average.
W. Somerset Maugham
#31. The morning drew on and the sun touched the mist so that it shone whitely like the ghost of snow on a dying star.
W. Somerset Maugham
#32. It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.
W. Somerset Maugham
#33. [Thoreau] is a nimble skater who cuts elegant and complicated figures on a surface of frozen platitudes. Perhaps he would have been a better writer if he had not been quite so good a man.
W. Somerset Maugham
#34. An art is only great and significant if it is one that all may enjoy. The art of a clique is but a plaything.
W. Somerset Maugham
#35. 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.
W. Somerset Maugham
#36. Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.
W. Somerset Maugham
#37. I did not hesitate to put the question that came to the tip of my tongue. After all, if you want to know something the best way is to ask.
W. Somerset Maugham
#38. It was as though the house had been left empty but a minute before and yet that minute was fraught with eternity so that you could not imagine that ever again that house would echo with talk and resound with laughter.
W. Somerset Maugham
#39. What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably ... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.
W. Somerset Maugham
#41. And I have the sunset, and the Tuscan wine, and the white teeth of the women in Rome. I am a traveler in Romance.
W. Somerset Maugham
#42. 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.
W. Somerset Maugham
#43. In religion above all things the only thing of use is an objective truth. The only God that is of use is a being who is personal, supreme and good, and whose existence is as certain as that two and two make four.
W. Somerset Maugham
#45. The officers saluted as she passed and gravely bowed. They walked back across the courtyard and got into their chairs. She saw Waddington light a cigarette. A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man.
W. Somerset Maugham
#46. It is astonishing how many books I find there is no need for me to read at all.
W. Somerset Maugham
#47. Mrs. MacAndrew shared the common opinion of her sex that a man is always a brute to leave a woman who is attached to him, but that a woman is much to blame if he does.
W. Somerset Maugham
#48. He found that it was easy to make a heroic gesture, but hard to abide by its results.
W. Somerset Maugham
#49. Are you sure you can prevent yourself from falling in love one of these days? Such things do happen, you know, even to the most prudent men.'
Simon gave him a strange, one might even have thought a hostile, look.
I should tear it out of my heart as I'd wrench out of my mouth a rotten tooth.
W. Somerset Maugham
#50. Oh, my dear, you musn't be offended just because I've taken away from you the satisfaction of thinking that you have been deceiving me all these months.
W. Somerset Maugham
#51. The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.
W. Somerset Maugham
#52. You see, you and I are the only people here who walk quite quietly and peaceably on solid ground. The nuns walk in heaven and your husband
in darkness.
W. Somerset Maugham
#53. One of the falsest of proverbs is that you must lie on the bed that you have made. The experience of life shows that people are constantly doing things which must lead to disaster, and yet by come chance manage to evade the result of their folly.
W. Somerset Maugham
#54. It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest.
W. Somerset Maugham
#55. You should read Spanish,' he said. 'It is a noble tongue. It has not the mellifluousness of Italian
Italian is the language of tenors and organ-grinders
but it has grandeur: it does not ripple like a brook in a garden, but it surges tumultuous like a mighty river in a flood.
W. Somerset Maugham
#56. Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.
W. Somerset Maugham
W. Somerset Maugham
#57. The sea offers the only broad horizon, and the immense he saw now gave him a peculiar, an indescribable thrill. He felt suddenly elated. Though he did not know it, it was the first time that he had experienced, quite undeluted with foreign emotions, the sense of beauty.
W. Somerset Maugham
#59. She took my hand and told me not to grieve; for wherever we were, she said, there was France and there was God.
W. Somerset Maugham
#60. No pain in love is so hard to bear as that which comes from the impossibility of doing any service from the well-beloved, and no service is so repulsive that love cannot make it delightful and easy.
W. Somerset Maugham
#61. They don't want clever men; clever men have ideas, and ideas cause trouble; they want men who have charm and tact and who can be counted on never to make a blunder.
W. Somerset Maugham
#62. Roy has always sincerely believed what everyone else believed at the moment.
W. Somerset Maugham
#64. When death stood round the corner, taking lives like a gardener digging up potatoes, it was foolishness to care what dirty things this person or that did with his body.
W. Somerset Maugham
#65. 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.
W. Somerset Maugham
#66. No married man's ever made up his mind until he's heard what his wife has got to say about it.
W. Somerset Maugham
#67. Her pain was so great that she could have screamed at the top of her voice. She had never known that one could suffer so much; and she asked herself desperately what she had done to deserve it.
W. Somerset Maugham
#68. But beauty is not the only thing that makes a woman attractive; indeed, great beauty is often somewhat chilling: you admire, but are not moved.
W. Somerset Maugham
#69. It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.
W. Somerset Maugham
#70. A laboratory had been fitted up, army classes were instituted; they all said the character of the school was changing. And heaven only knew what further projects Mr. Perkins turned in that untidy head of his.
W. Somerset Maugham
#71. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.
W. Somerset Maugham
#72. Don't you think he may be pursuing an ideal that is hidden in a cloud of unknowing - like an astronomer looking for a star that only a mathematical calculation tells him exists?
W. Somerset Maugham
#74. The crown of literature is poetry. It is the end and aim. It is the sublimest activity od the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty.
W. Somerset Maugham
#75. A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.
W. Somerset Maugham
#76. It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.
W. Somerset Maugham
#77. If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.
W. Somerset Maugham
#79. You poor lonely boy,' she cried, 'it's so dreadful for you to have no parents.'
Well, as my mother was a whore, and my father a drunk, I daresay I don't miss much.
W. Somerset Maugham
#80. I never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.
W. Somerset Maugham
#81. Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs.
W. Somerset Maugham
#82. He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her.
W. Somerset Maugham
#83. I do not think you want too much sincerity in society. It would be like an iron girder in a house of cards.
W. Somerset Maugham
#84. To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the
personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am
willing to excuse a thousand faults.
W. Somerset Maugham
#87. I have noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone and, finding you out, leaves a message begging you to call him up the moment you come in, as it's important, the matter is often more important to him than to you.
W. Somerset Maugham
#88. It's always difficult to make conversation with a drunk, and there's no denying it, the sober are at a disadvantage with him.
W. Somerset Maugham
#89. The soft airs of spring blew through the sketch into that sordid chamber, and for the beating of a pulse you were in touch with the eternal
W. Somerset Maugham
#90. We have long passed the Victorian Era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.
W. Somerset Maugham
#91. Philip had a practical outlook and he grew impatient with the theories which resulted in no action.
W. Somerset Maugham
#92. Culture is not just an ornament; it is the expression of a nation's character, and at the same time it is a powerful instrument to mould character. The end of culture is right living.
W. Somerset Maugham
#93. But there is nothing men lie about so much as about their sexual life,...
W. Somerset Maugham
#94. Its a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, few are chosen.
W. Somerset Maugham
#95. 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.
W. Somerset Maugham
#96. So now what?'
'Well, if you insist on marrying me ... But it's an awful risk we're taking!'
'Darling, that's what life's for - to take risks.
W. Somerset Maugham
#97. They had furtive eyes and weak chins. There was no wickedness in them, but only pettiness and vulgarity.
W. Somerset Maugham
#98. Philip that there were three things to find out: man's relation to the world he lives in, man's relation with the men among whom he lives, and finally man's relation
W. Somerset Maugham
#99. The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones.
W. Somerset Maugham
#100. Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.
W. Somerset Maugham
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
