Top 500 W. Somerset Maugham Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The audience is a very curious animal. It is shrewd rather than intelligent. Its mental capacity is less than that of its most intellectual members.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

202. “A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

203. “It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

204. “Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

205. “But what is criticism? Criticism is purely destructive; anyone can destroy, but not everyone can build up.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

206. “A state of reverie does not avoid reality, it accedes to reality.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

207. “We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

208. “No man in his heart is quite so cynical as a well-bred woman.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

209. “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.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

210. “You know, the Philistines have long since discarded the rack and stake as a means of suppressing the opinions they feared: they’ve discovered a much more deadly weapon of destruction – the wisecrack.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

211. “A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there’s only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

212. “If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

213. “I’d sooner be smashed into a mangled pulp by a bus when we cross the street than look forward to a life like yours.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

214. “Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

215. “Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

216. “Most people are such fools that it is really no great compliment to say that someone is above the average.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

217. “When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

218. “I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

219. “The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

220. “Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

221. “You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance, and the humorist, with a smile and perhaps a sigh, is more likely to shrug his shoulders than to condemn.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

222. “Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

223. “Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

224. “Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

225. “The first duty of a woman is to be pretty, the second is to be well-groomed, and the third is never to contradict.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

226. “Women’s hearts are like old china, none the worse for a break or two.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

227. “I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one’s own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody’s else advice.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

228. “I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

229. “There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

230. “It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

231. “You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

232. “There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one’s means of livelihood.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

233. “Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

234. “I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the center of the world.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

236. “Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

237. “Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, depreciating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a common room.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

238. “Common sense and nature will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

239. “There is no cruelty greater than a woman’s to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an insane irritation.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

240. “Women are often under the impression that men are much more madly in love with them than they really are.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

241. “Because women can do nothing except love, they’ve given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it’s the whole of life. It’s an insignificant part.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

242. “I do not think you want too much sincerity in society. It would be like an iron girder in a house of cards.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

243. “The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

244. “From the earliest time the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

245. “Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life’s ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

246. “There is no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to be able to tell you what mutton tastes like. It is enough if he eats a cutlet. But he should do that.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

247. “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.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

248. “The essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

249. “There’s no one as transparent as the person who thinks he’s devilish deep.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

250. “There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed.”

— W. Somerset Maugham