Top 500 W. Somerset Maugham Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

354. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

356. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

361. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

365. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

371. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

376. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

378. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

380. “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

381. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

384. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

388. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

390. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

393. “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

394. “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

395. “Evil can be condoned only if in the beyond it is compensated by good and god himself needs immortality to vindicate his ways to man.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

396. “It needs a good deal of philosophy not to be mortified by the thought of persons who have voluntarily abandoned everything that for the most of us makes life worth living and are devoid of envy of what they have missed. I have never made up my mind whether they are fools or wise men.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

397. “I do not believe they are right who say that the defects of famous men should be ignored. I think it is better that we should know them. Then, though we are conscious of having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe that that is no hindrance to our achieving also something of their virtues.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

398. “People don’t want reasons to do what they’d like to. They want excuses.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

399. “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

400. “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