W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to the universities go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene ... They are scum.

It must be that to govern a nation you need a specific talent and that this may very well exist without general ability.

Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness.

In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honesty is not only the best but the only policy.

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 triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.

Writing is a wholetime job: no professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it.

Cronshaw stopped for a moment to drink. He had pondered for twenty years the problem whether he loved liquor because it made him talk or whether he loved conversation because it made him thirsty.

Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.

If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be as overpopulated as it is now.

I thought it was only in revealed religion that a mistranslation improved the sense.

Clearly much that seemed valid seemed so only because he had been taught it from earliest youth.

There's nothing the world loves more than a ready-made description which they can hang on to a man, and so save themselves all trouble in future.

So long as some are strong and some are weak, the weak will be driven to the wall.

In heaven, when the blessed use the telephone they will say what they have to say and not a word besides.

If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it.

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.

She was a fool and he knew it and because he loved her it had made no difference.

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.

The artist can within limits make what he likes of his life... It is only the artist, and maybe the criminal, who can make his own.

The nature of men and women - their essential nature - is so vile and despicable that if you were to portray a person as he really is, no one would believe you.

You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.

Why did you look at the sunset?'Philip answered with his mouth full:Because I was happy.

You cannot write unless you write much.

we do not write as we want but as we can

No egoism is so insufferable as the Christian with regard to his soul.

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.

The most difficult thing for a wise woman to do is to pretend to be a foolish one.

The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them.

She had never felt so light of heart and it seemed to her as though her body were a shell that lay at her feet and she pure spirit. Here was Beauty.

His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless ...

Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it’s a mistake to make a habit of it.

The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes.

They will notdisappoint you, and you will look upon them morecharitably. Men seek but one thing in life—their pleasure

I don’t see why the things we believe absolutely now shouldn’t be just as wrong as what they believed in the past.’‘Neither do I.’‘Then how can you believe anything at all?’‘I don’t know.

Did you really cease to love a person because you had been treated cruelly?

Act so that every action of yours should be capable of becoming an universal rule of action for all men.

...her very kindness was cruel because it was founded not on love but on reason...

Can the law get blood out of a stone? I haven't any money.

I'm one of the few persons I ever met who are able to learn from experience.

...some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not.

He thought to himself that there could be no greater torture in the world than at the same time to love and to contemn.

To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.

The silence was enchanting. Infinite space seemed to enter it, and my spirit, alone with the stars, seemed capable of any adventure.

I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart’s blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.

Milk is very nice, especially with a drop of brandy in it, but the domestic cow is only too glad to be rid of it. A swollen udder is very uncomfortable

The path to Salvation is as narrow and as difficult to walk as a razor's edge.

I only wanted to suggest to you that self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling.

To me he seemed one of those persons destined to failure of whom you wonder what purpose it can ever serve that they should have ben born.

I do not believe that I am a vindictive man, but when the immortal gods take a hand in the matter it is pardonable to observe the results with complacency.