Top 500 W. Somerset Maugham Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “It was not for me to leave the world and retire to a cloister, but to live in the world and love the objects of the world, not indeed for themselves, but for the Infinite that is in them.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

452. “When a woman’s amorous advances are declined by a man she is apt to draw one or two conclusions; one is that he is homosexual and the other is that he is impotent.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

453. “It is not very comfortable to have the gift of being amused at one’s own absurdity.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

454. “The only reasonable thing was to accept the good of men and be patient with their faults. The words of the dying God crossed his memory: Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

455. “She had asked if he was good-looking. ‘No, I don’t think he is,’ answered Margaret, ‘but he’s very paintable.’ ‘That is an answer which has the advantage of sounding well and meaning nothing,’ smiled Susie. She.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

456. “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.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

457. “Don’t talk to me about the country. The doctor said I was to go there for six weeks last summer. It nearly killed me, I give you my word. The noise of it. All them birds singin’ all the time, and the cocks crowin’ and the cows mooin’. I couldn’t stick it. When you’ve lived all the years I ’ave in peace and quietness you can’t get used to all that racket goin’ on all the time.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

458. “At that bureau a lovesick woman in a crinoline, her hair parted in the middle, may have written a passionate letter to her faithless lover, or a peppery old gentleman in a green frock coat and a stock indited an angry epistle to his extravagant son.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

459. “I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

460. “Here was a man who sincerely did not mind what people thought of him, and so convention had no hold on him; he was like a wrestler whose body is oiled; you could not get a grip on him; it gave him a freedom which was an outrage.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

461. “Philip knew by now that whenever anyone was angry with him his first thought was to say something about his club-foot. His estimate of the human race was determined by the fact that scarcely anyone failed to resist the temptation.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

462. “I never ceased to admire the way in which, while he bowed with courtly grace to those exalted personages, he managed to maintain the independent demeanor of the citizen of a country where all men are said to be born equal.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

463. “He could not show his feelings. People told him he was unemotional: but he knew he was at the mercy of his emotions: an accidental kindness touched him so much that sometimes he did not venture to speak in order not to betray the unsteadiness of his will.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

464. “The world is hard and cruel. We are here none knows why, and we go none knows whither. We must be very humble. We must see the beauty of quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us. And let us seek the love of simple, ignorant people. Their ignorance is better than all our knowledge. Let us be silent, content in our little corner, meek and gentle like them. That is the wisdom of life.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

465. “I always think it a pity that, fashion having decided that the doings of the aristocracy are no longer a proper subject for serious fiction, Roy, always keenly sensitive to the tendency of the age, should in his later novels have confined himself to the spiritual, conflicts of solicitors, chartered accountants, and produce brokers. He does not move in these circles with his old assurance.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

467. “We paint from within outward – if we force our vision on the world it calls us great painters; if we don’t it ignores us; but we are the same. We don’t attach any meaning to greatness or smallness. What happens to our work afterward is unimportant; we have got all we could out of it while we were doing it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

468. “Perhaps that is the wisdom of life, to tread in your father’s steps, and look neither to the right nor to the left.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

469. “The only way to live is to forget that you’re going to die. Death is unimportant. The fear of it should never influence a single action of the wise man.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

470. “Everything was soft about her, her voice, her smile, her laugh; her eyes, which were small and pale, had the softness of flowers; her manner was as soft as the summer rain.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

471. “When I’ve seen you go into an empty room I’ve sometimes wanted to open the door suddenly, but I’ve been afraid to in case I found nobody there.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

472. “Patsy had asked him if he had had adventures in Paris and he had truthfully answered no. It was a fact that he had done nothing; his father thought he had had a devil of a time and was afraid he had contracted a venereal disease, and he hadn’t even had a woman; only one thing had happened to him, it was rather curious when you came to think of it, and he didn’t just then quite know what to do about it: the bottom had fallen out of his world.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

473. “Philip got up and knelt down to say his prayers. It was a cold morning, and he shivered a little; but he had been taught by his uncle that his prayers were more acceptable to God if he said them in his nightshirt than if he waited till he was dressed. This did not surprise him, for he was beginning to realize that he was a creature of a God who appreciated the discomfort of his worshippers.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

474. “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

475. “On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet’s history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it, so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

476. “Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue;.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

477. “Everything passed, and what trace of its passage remained? It seemed to Kitty that they were all, the human race, like the drops of water in that river and they flowed on, each so close to the other and yet so far apart, a nameless flood, to the sea. When all things lasted so short a time and nothing mattered very much, it seemed pitiful that men, attaching an absurd importance to trivial objects, should make themselves and one another so unhappy.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

478. “The important thing is character. It’s my character I’ve got to mould. I’m sure one can do anything with oneself if one tries. It’s only a matter of will.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

479. “She had an idea that he would welcome an uprush of emotion which would liberate him from this nightmare of resentment, but that, in his pathetic folly, he would fight when it came with all his might against it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

480. “The world consists of me and my thoughts and my feelings; and everything else is mere fancy. Life is a dream in which I create the objects that come before me. Everything knowable, every object of experience, is an idea in my mind, and without my mind it does not exist. Dream and reality are one. Life is a connected and consisted dream, and when I cease to dream, the world, with its beauty, its pain and sorrow, its unimaginable variety, will cease to be. take life as it is. just the way it is.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

481. “He did not like old people, and resented it when he was invited to meet only persons of his own age, and the young he found vapid.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

482. “But it’s loving that’s the important thing, not being loved. One’s not even grateful to the people who love one; if one doesn’t love them, they only bore one.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

483. “She was like a silvery flower of the night that only gave its perfume to the moonbeams.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

484. “The idealist withdrew himself, because he could not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had not the strength to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain, and since his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled himself with despising his fellows.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

485. “A man’s work reveals him. In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, but in his book or his picture the real man delivers himself defenceless. No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind. No one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

486. “Laugh while you’ve got the chance, you won’t laugh much when you are dead and buried.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

487. “It was all make-believe that he had lived on, and when the truth shattered it he thought reality itself was shattered.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

488. “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

489. “We are foolish and sentimental and melodramatic at twenty-five, but if we weren’t perhaps we should be less wise at fifty.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

490. “I did not believe him capable of love. That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness either for himself or for others; there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to protect, an eagerness to do good and to give pleasure – if not unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

491. “I’m afraid it sounds very rude, but I hope from the bottom of my heart that I shall never set eyes on any of you again.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

492. “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

493. “The artist, painter, poet, or musician, by his decoration, sublime or beautiful, satisfies the aesthetic sense; but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

494. “I have noticed that when I am most serious people are apt to laugh at me, and indeed when after a lapse of time I have read passages that I wrote from the fullness of my heart I have been tempted to laugh at myself. It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

495. “Mary Ann did not like Miss Wilkinson and called her an old cat.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

496. “He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. 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 ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

497. “I wish to deal only with the masterpieces which the consensus of opinion for a long time has accepted as supreme. We are all supposed to have read them; it is a pity that so few of us have.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

498. “When some incident has shattered the career you’ve mapped out for yourself, a folly, a crime or a misfortune, you mustn’t think you’re down and out. It may be a stroke of luck, and when you look back years later you may say to yourself that you wouldn’t for anything in the world exchange the new life disaster has forced upon you for the dull, humdrum existence you would have led if circumstances hadn’t intervened.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

499. “Heaven knows, I’m the easiest woman in the world to get on with, but I will not be bullied by any man. After all, I have my self-respect to think of.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

500. “In the novels I had read whenever lovely woman stooped to folly she had a baby. The cause was put with infinite precaution, sometimes indeed suggested only by a row of asterisks, but the result was inevitable.”

— W. Somerset Maugham