Top 500 W. Somerset Maugham Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

302. “I cannot believe in a God who has neither humor nor common sense.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

303. “I don’t think that women ought to sit down at table with men. It ruins conversation and I’m sure it’s very bad for them. It puts ideas in their heads, and women are never at ease with themselves when they have ideas.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

304. “The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?”

— W. Somerset Maugham

305. “Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it’s a mistake to make a habit out of it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

306. “We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

307. “It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

308. “It does the heart good to look at you.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

309. “The humorist has a good eye for the humbug; he does not always recognize the saint.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

310. “Cronshaw stopped for a moment to drink. He had pondered for twenty years the problem whether he loved liquor because it made him talk or whether he loved conversation because it made him thirsty.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

311. “The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

312. “Evil is a necessary part of the order of the universe.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

313. “The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

314. “Perfect is determined in shortened measures of time, not over long periods of time or lifetimes. It would be unnatural.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

315. “It is unfair to expect a politician to live in private up to the statements he makes in public.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

316. “Nothing more predisposes someone in our favour than to let him rob you a little.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

317. “Considering how foolishly people act and how pleasantly they prattle, perhaps it would be better for the world if they talked more and did less.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

318. “No married man’s ever made up his mind until he’s heard what his wife has got to say about it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

319. “I’m not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?”

— W. Somerset Maugham

320. “Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

321. “He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

322. “He found that it was easy to make a heroic gesture, but hard to abide by its results.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

323. “He exulted in the possession of himself once more; he realized how much of the delight of the world he had lost when he was absorbed in that madness which they called love; he had had enough of it; he did not want to be in love anymore if love was that.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

324. “No action is in itself good or bad, but only such according to convention.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

325. “Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

326. “You must not pursue a success, but fly from it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

327. “I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

328. “In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

329. “A novelist must preserve a childlike belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

330. “I don’t know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

331. “She says it’s really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

332. “I prefer a loose woman to a selfish one and a wanton to a fool.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

333. “She had no mercy. He looked at her neck and thought how he would like to jab it with the knife he had for his muffin. He knew enough anatomy to make pretty certain of getting the carotid artery. And at the same time he wanted to cover her pale, thin face with kisses.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

334. “It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

335. “Success. I don’t believe it has any effect on me. For one thing I always expected it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

336. “Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more than the opium of an intelligentsia.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

337. “Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

338. “The ideas for stories that thronged my brain would not let me rest till I had got rid of them by writing them.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

339. “It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

340. “I’m only twenty-five. If I’ve made a mistake I have time to correct it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

341. “The great trues are too important to be new.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

342. “When you’re eighteen your emotions are violent, but they’re not durable.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

343. “Comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued; while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

344. “Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which this consists.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

345. “Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

346. “It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

347. “What I’m trying to tell you is that there are men who are possessed by an urge so strong to do some particular thing that they can’t help themselves, they’ve got to do it. They’re prepared to sacrifice everything to satisfy their yearning.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

348. “The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

349. “I like manual labor. Whenever I’ve got waterlogged with study, I’ve taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

350. “It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.”

— W. Somerset Maugham