Top 500 W. Somerset Maugham Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

302. “We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

303. “You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you’re cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

305. “D’you call life a bad job? Never! We’ve had our ups and downs, we’ve had our struggles, we’ve always been poor, but it’s been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

306. “Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

307. “I promised myself that if ever I had some money that I would savor a cigar each day after lunch and dinner. This is the only resolution of my youth that I have kept, and the only realized ambition which has not brought disillusion.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

308. “So long as some are strong and some are weak, the weak will be driven to the wall.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

309. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

315. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

324. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

330. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— 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. “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

335. “The average American can get into the kingdom of heaven much more easily than he can get into the Boulevard St. Germain.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

338. “The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

339. “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

340. “We can only guess at the thoughts and emotions of our neighbors. Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower and he communicates with the other prisoners, who form mankind, by conventional signs that have not quite the same meaning for them as for himself.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

341. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

344. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

347. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham