Top 500 W. Somerset Maugham Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

52. “A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?”

— W. Somerset Maugham

53. “A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self indulgence.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

54. “No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

55. “Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

56. “All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

57. “Tolerance is another word for indifference.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

58. “The value of culture is its effect on character. It avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens that. Its use is for life. Its aim is not beauty but goodness.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

59. “There is only one thing about which I am certain, and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

60. “Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

61. “Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

62. “Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

64. “The crown of literature is poetry.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

65. “Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

66. “Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

67. “The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

68. “The passing moment is all we can be sure of; it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

69. “The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

70. “It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

71. “Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

72. “I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

73. “It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

74. “There are few things so pleasant as a picnic eaten in perfect comfort.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

75. “What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?”

— W. Somerset Maugham

76. “Its a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, few are chosen.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

77. “Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

78. “It was such a beautiful day I decided to stay in bed.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

79. “The dead look so terribly dead when they’re dead.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

80. “It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

81. “Thank God, I can look at a sunset now without having to think how to describe it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

82. “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.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

83. “When we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

84. “Love is what happens to men and women who don’t know each other.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

85. “You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

86. “You can never know enough about your characters.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

87. “It is bad enough to know the past; it would be intolerable to know the future.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

88. “If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

89. “The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

90. “Our natural egoism leads us to judge people by their relations to ourselves. We want them to be certain things to us, and for us that is what they are; because the rest of them is no good to us, we ignore it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

91. “I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

92. “A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

93. “To write simply is as difficult as to be good.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

94. “With the superciliousness of extreme youth, I put thirty-five as the utmost limit at which a man might fall in love without making a fool of himself.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

95. “A woman may be as wicked as she likes, but if she isn’t pretty it won’t do her much good.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

96. “You see, money to you means freedom; to me it means bondage.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

97. “There are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity. I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?”

— W. Somerset Maugham

98. “Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

99. “You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham