Top 500 W. Somerset Maugham Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

355. “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

356. “Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

357. “Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

358. “It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

359. “Dullness is the first requisite of a good husband.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

360. “Because a man can write great works he is none the less a man.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

362. “There’s nothing the world loves more than a ready-made description which they can hang on to a man, and so save themselves all trouble in future.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

364. “The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

365. “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

366. “The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain, just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

367. “There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

368. “It must be that to govern a nation you need a specific talent and that this may very well exist without general ability.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

369. “The end of culture is right living.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

370. “He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

371. “Men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

372. “The Almighty can hardly be such a fool as the churches make out.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

373. “The humour of Dostoievsky is the humour of a barloafer who ties a kettle to a dog’s tail.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

374. “If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn’t be as overpopulated as it is now.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

375. “Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

376. “I never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

377. “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

378. “Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

379. “It was like making a blunder at a party; there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

380. “No egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

381. “A man filled with meat turns his back on the dry bones of political doctrine. Fanatical devotion to the ruling party comes more readily from the materially deprived At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

382. “I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one’s power of appreciation persists.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

383. “If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

384. “A good story is obviously a difficult thing to invent, but its difficulty is a poor reason for despising it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

385. “Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

386. “From old habit, unconsciously he thanked God that he no longer believed in Him.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

387. “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

388. “Clearly much that seemed valid seemed so only because he had been taught it from earliest youth.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

389. “By the time an actor knows how to act any sort of part he is often too old to act any but a few.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

390. “I saw its ordered happiness, but a fever in my blood asked for a wilder course. There seemed to me something alarming in such easy delights. In my heart was a desire to live more dangerously. I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if I could only have change – change and the excitement of the unforeseen.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

391. “A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else believes.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

392. “Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

393. “When a man’s in love, he at once makes a pedestal of the Ten Commandments and stands on the top of them with his arms akimbo. When a woman’s in love she doesn’t care two straws for Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

394. “It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

395. “You cannot write unless you write much.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

396. “If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy. We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing too.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

397. “From the standpoint of what eternity is it better to have read a thousand books than to have ploughed a million furrows?”

— W. Somerset Maugham

398. “If only the good were a little less heavy-footed.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

399. “With old and young great sorrow is followed by a sleepless night, and with the old great joy is as disturbing; but you, I suppose, finds happiness more natural and its rest is not disturbed by it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

400. “There are directors who desire to be artistic. It is pathetic to compare the seriousness of their aim with the absurdity of their attainment.”

— W. Somerset Maugham