Top 500 W. Somerset Maugham Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

452. “I do not like these painted faces that look all alike; and I think women are foolish to dull their expression and obscure their personality with powder, rouge, and lipstick.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

453. “I was shocked and thrilled by what Mary-Ann told me, but I had difficulty in believing it. I had read too many novels and had learnt too much at school not to know a good deal about love, but I thought it was a matter that only concerned young people. I could not conceive that a man with a beard, who had sons as old as I, could have any feelings of that sort. I thought when you married all that was finished. That people over thirty should be in love seemed to me rather disgusting.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

454. “He seemed to see his fellow creatures grotesquely, and he was angry with them because they were grotesque; life was a confusion of ridiculous, sordid happenings, a fit subject for laughter, and yet it made him sorrowful to laugh.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

455. “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

456. “Can the law get blood out of a stone? I haven’t any money.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

457. “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

458. “Nothing is more tedious than to talk with persons who treat your most obvious remarks as startling paradoxes and Edward suffered likewise from that passion for argument which is the bad talkers’ substitution for conversation. People who cannot talk are always proud of their dialectic. They want to modify your tritest observations and even if you suggest the day is fine, insist on arguing it out.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

459. “It was a night so beautiful that your soul seemed hardly able to bear the prison of the body.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

460. “What he taught was very simple. He taught that we are all greater than we know and that wisdom is the means to freedom.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

461. “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

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

— 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. “The faculty for myth is innate in the human race. It seizes with avidity upon any incidents, surprising or mysterious, in the career of those who have at all distinguished themselves from their fellows, and invents a legend to which it then attaches a fanatical belief.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

466. “His death had been as futile as his life. He died ingloriously, of a stupid disease, failing once more, even at the end, to accomplish anything.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

470. “My instinct told me I’d be silly to fall in love with him, you know women are very unfortunate, so often when they fall in love they cease to be lovable, and I made up my mind to be on my guard.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

471. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

473. “His second novel was successful, but not so successful as to arouse the umbrageous susceptibilities of his competitors. In fact it confirmed them in their suspicions that he would never set the Thames on fire. He was a jolly good fellow; no side, or anything like that: they were quite content to give a leg up to a man who would never climb so high as to be an obstacle to themselves. I know some who smile bitterly now when they reflect on the mistake they made.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

474. “Though he believed implicitly everything he saw in print, he had learned already that in the Bible things that said one thing quite clearly often mysteriously meant another.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

480. “Deprecatingly, fully conscious of his audacity in asking so busy a man to waste his time on a neophyte’s puny effort, he begged for criticism and guidance.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

481. “One does not really feel much grief at other people’s sorrows; one tries, and puts on a melancholy face, thinking oneself brutal for not caring more; but one cannot and it is better, for if one grieved too deeply at other people’s tears, life would be unendurable; and every man has sufficient sorrows of his own without taking to heart his neighbour’s.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

482. “He was interested in the human side of that struggle to express something which was so obscure in the man’s mind that he was become morbid and querulous. Philip felt vaguely that he himself was himself in the same case, but with him it was the conduct of his life as a whole that perplexed him. That was his means of self-expression, and what he must do with it was not clear.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

488. “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

489. “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

490. “I do not know if others are like myself, but I am conscious that I cannot contemplate beauty long.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

491. “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

492. “I myself stand on one side and the rest of the world on the other. There is an abyss between, that no power can cross, a strange barrier more insuperable than a mountain of fire. Husband and wife know nothing of one another. However ardent their passion, however intimate their union, they are never one; they are scarcely more to one another than strangers.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

493. “It just shows that you may make a great stir in the world and yet sadly fail to impress the members of your own family.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

494. “Flaubert prided himself on his frankness; it was indeed brutal.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

495. “Our wise old church... has discovered that if you will act as if you believed belief will be given to you; if you pray with doubt, but pray with sincerity, your doubt will be dispelled; if you will surrender yourself to the beauty of that liturgy the power of which over the human spirit has been proved by the experience of the ages, peace will descend upon you.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

496. “Life was not so horrible if it was meaningless, and he faced it with a strange sense of power.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

497. “Love will be stronger and last longer if there are impediments to its gratification.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

498. “I always found Dickens very coarse. I don’t want to read about people who drop their aitches.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

499. “She was willing to do everything in the world for me except the one thing I wanted: to leave me alone.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

500. “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