W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil Quotes

How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and you were my whole life. It is not very pleasant to realize that to you it was only an episode.

If a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him, it's his fault, not hers.

If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.

One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her.

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 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.

She says it's really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate.

She alone had been blind to his merit. Why? Because he loved her and she did not love him. What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?