Top 500 W. Somerset Maugham Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty; the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

203. “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

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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

216. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

225. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

227. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

230. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

237. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

239. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

241. “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

242. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

244. “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

245. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

247. “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

248. “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

249. “It is one of the defects of my character that I cannot altogether dislike anyone who makes me laugh.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

250. “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