Top 500 W. Somerset Maugham Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

305. “When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

306. “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

307. “In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— 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. “She was a fool and he knew it and because he loved her it had made no difference.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

313. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

315. “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

316. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

318. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— 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. “We find things beautiful because we recognize them and contrariwise we find things beautiful because their novelty surprises us.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

325. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

328. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

331. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

333. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

337. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

339. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

341. “She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

342. “An art is only great and significant if it is one that all may enjoy. The art of a clique is but a plaything.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

344. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

347. “No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

348. “By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

349. “It is astonishing how many books I find there is no need for me to read at all.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

350. “It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth.”

— W. Somerset Maugham