Top 500 W. Somerset Maugham Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “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

452. “Well, Henry, if I were you I wouldn’t worry”, said the lawyer. “My belief is that your boy’s born lucky, and in the long run that’s better than to be born clever or rich.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

453. “And they had a fairly pleasant time in Pretoria. Eventually, I believe, wars will be quite bloodless; rival armies will perambulate, and whenever one side has got into a good position, the other will surrender wholesale.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

459. “I found something wonderfully satisfying in the notion that you can attain Reality by knowledge. In later ages the sages of India in recognition of human infirmity admitted that salvation may be won by the way of love and the way of works, but they never denied that the noblest way, though the hardest, is the way of knowledge, for its instrument is the most precious faculty of man, his reason.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

473. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

475. “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

476. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

484. “Who am I to explain the infinite complexities of human nature?”

— W. Somerset Maugham

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

489. “He knew that she had been dreaming that night and he knew what her dreams were about. She had forgotten them. He forebode to look at her. It gave him a grim, horrible, and rather uncanny sensation to think that a vivid, lacerating life could go on when one sunk in unconsciousness, a life so real that it could cause tears to stream down the face and twist the mouth in woe, and yet when the sleeper woke left no recollection behind.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

490. “The experience of life shows that people are constantly doing things which must lead to disaster, and yet by some chance manage to evade the result of their folly.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

491. “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

492. “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

493. “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

494. “One idealizes people when they’re away, it’s true that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and when one sees them again one’s often surprised that one saw anything in them at all.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

495. “But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

496. “The Hindus would say that there was no beginning. The individual soul, co-existent with the universe, has existed from all eternity and owes its nature to some prior existence.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

497. “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

498. “Melville, by his own account, spent four months in the valley. He was well treated. He made friends with a girl called Fayaway, swam and boated with her, and except for his fear of being eaten was happy enough.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

499. “He was the most inconsiderable creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

500. “I ought to have lived in the eighteen hundreds,′ he said himself. ‘What I want is a patron. I should have published my poems by subscription and dedicated them to a nobleman. I long to compose rhymed couplets upon the poodle of a countess. My soul yearns for the love of chambermaids and the conversation of bishops.”

— W. Somerset Maugham