Top 500 W. Somerset Maugham Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “You cannot write unless you write much.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

402. “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

403. “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

404. “You are a deeply religious man who doesn’t believe in God.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

405. “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

406. “I suppose it had never struck him that, Ischia, which he looked at every evening to see what the weather would be like the next day, or Vesuvius, pearly in the dawn, had anything to do with him at all; but when he ceased to have them before his eyes he realized, in some dim fashion that they were as much part of him as his hands and his feet.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

407. “A woman attracts men by her charm and holds them by their vices.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

408. “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

409. “She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

410. “Unless love is passion, it’s not love, but something else; and passion thrives not on satisfaction, but on impediment.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

411. “A true story is never quite so true as an invented one.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

412. “He could as little escape her as the cause can escape the effect.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

413. “Enjoy yourself while you have the chance, I say; we shall all be dead in a hundred years and what will anything matter then?”

— W. Somerset Maugham

414. “She had the serenity of a summer evening when the light fades slowly from the unclouded sky.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

415. “Only a woman knows what a woman can do.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

416. “Sometimes I’ve thought of an island lost in a boundless sea, where I could live in some hidden valley, among strange trees, in silence. There I think I could find what I want.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

417. “For men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and they are not the very interesting ones; even women, with whom the subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for them.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

418. “I think I can tell you. I’ve always felt that there was something pathetic in the founders of religion who made it a condition of salvation that you should believe in them. It’s as though they needed your faith to have faith in themselves.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

419. “You should read Spanish,′ he said. ‘It is a noble tongue. It has not the mellifluousness of Italian – Italian is the language of tenors and organ-grinders – but it has grandeur: it does not ripple like a brook in a garden, but it surges tumultuous like a mighty river in a flood.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

420. “The faculty for myth is innate in the human race. It seizes with avidity upon any incidents, surprising or mysterious, in the career of those who have at all distinguished themselves from their fellows, and invents a legend to which it then attaches a fanatical belief.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

421. “The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

422. “Nothing is more tedious than to talk with persons who treat your most obvious remarks as startling paradoxes and Edward suffered likewise from that passion for argument which is the bad talkers’ substitution for conversation. People who cannot talk are always proud of their dialectic. They want to modify your tritest observations and even if you suggest the day is fine, insist on arguing it out.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

423. “It is hard that a man’s exterior should tally so little sometimes with his soul.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

424. “He was developing a sense of humour, and found that he had a knack of saying bitter things, which caught people on the raw; he said them because they amused him, hardly realizing how much they hurt, and was much offended when he found that his victims regarding him with active dislike.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

425. “Mrs. Strickland was plainly nervous. “Well, tell us your news,” she said. “I saw your husband. I’m afraid he’s quite made up his mind not to return.” I paused a little. “He wants to paint.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

426. “He thought to himself that there could be no greater torture in the world than at the same time to love and to contemn.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

427. “He had thought of love as a rapture which seized one so that all the world seemed spring-like, he had looked forward to an ecstatic happiness; but this was not happiness; it was a hunger of the soul, it was a painful yearning, it was a bitter anguish, he had never known before.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

428. “El arte es la naturaleza vista a traves de una personalidad.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

429. “Even here is something sad and terrible. But the impression is fleeting, and serves only to give a greater acuteness to the enjoyment of the moment. It is like the sadness which you may see in the jester’s eyes when a merry company is laughing at his sallies; his lips smile and his jokes are gayer because in that communion of laughter he find himself more intolerably alone.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

430. “It is a great misfortune to have a heart,” said Kitty, with a smile.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

431. “After all, it’s not my fault. I can’t force myself to believe. If there is a God after all and he punishes me because I honestly don’t believe in Him I can’t help it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

432. “Did Beethoven create his symphonies for his glorification? I don’t believe it. I believe he created them because the music in his soul demanded expression and then all he tried to do was to make them as perfect as he knew how.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

433. “For instance, he had a habit that poor Amy had a lot of trouble to break him of : after he’d finished his meat and vegetables he’d take a piece of bread and wipe the plate clean with it and eat it.” “Do you know what that means?” I said. “It means that for long he had so little to eat that he couldn’t afford to waste any food he could get.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

434. “The morning drew on and the sun touched the mist so that it shone whitely like the ghost of snow on a dying star.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

435. “It was a night so beautiful that your soul seemed hardly able to bear the prison of the body.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

436. “Thing I’ve always noticed, people don’t commit suicide for love, as you’d expect, that’s just a fancy of novelists; they commit suicide because they haven’t got any money.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

437. “His second novel was successful, but not so successful as to arouse the umbrageous susceptibilities of his competitors. In fact it confirmed them in their suspicions that he would never set the Thames on fire. He was a jolly good fellow; no side, or anything like that: they were quite content to give a leg up to a man who would never climb so high as to be an obstacle to themselves. I know some who smile bitterly now when they reflect on the mistake they made.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

438. “Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me, and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium–smoker to his pipe. I.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

439. “Don’t you think he may be pursuing an ideal that is hidden in a cloud of unknowing – like an astronomer looking for a star that only a mathematical calculation tells him exists?”

— W. Somerset Maugham

440. “It looked as though you did not act in a certain way because you thought in a certain way, but rather you thought in a certain way because you were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing to do with it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

441. “I have great affection for you, Roy” I answered, “but I don’t think you are the sort of person I’d care to have breakfast with.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

442. “The silence was enchanting. Infinite space seemed to enter it, and my spirit, alone with the stars, seemed capable of any adventure.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

443. “I found something wonderfully satisfying in the notion that you can attain Reality by knowledge. In later ages the sages of India in recognition of human infirmity admitted that salvation may be won by the way of love and the way of works, but they never denied that the noblest way, though the hardest, is the way of knowledge, for its instrument is the most precious faculty of man, his reason.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

444. “We paint from within outward – if we force our vision on the world it calls us great painters; if we don’t it ignores us; but we are the same. We don’t attach any meaning to greatness or smallness. What happens to our work afterward is unimportant; we have got all we could out of it while we were doing it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

445. “I am willing to take life as a game of chess in which the first rules are not open to discussion. No one asks why the knight is allowed his eccentric hop, why the castle may only go straight and the bishop obliquely. These things are to be accepted, and with these rule the game must be played: it is foolish to complain of them.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

446. “The only way to live is to forget that you’re going to die. Death is unimportant. The fear of it should never influence a single action of the wise man.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

447. “All sensible people know that vanity is the most devastating, the most universal and the most ineradicable of the passions that afflict the soul of man, and it is only vanity that makes him deny its power. It is more consuming than love. With advancing years, mercifully, you can snap your fingers at the terror and the servitude of love, but age cannot free you from the thraldom of vanity.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

448. “It was not for me to leave the world and retire to a cloister, but to live in the world and love the objects of the world, not indeed for themselves, but for the Infinite that is in them.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

449. “When a woman’s amorous advances are declined by a man she is apt to draw one or two conclusions; one is that he is homosexual and the other is that he is impotent.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

450. “It is not very comfortable to have the gift of being amused at one’s own absurdity.”

— W. Somerset Maugham