Top 500 W. Somerset Maugham Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

405. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

408. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

410. “Life is short, nature is hostile, and man is ridiculous; but oddly enough most misfortunes have their compensations, and with a certain humour and a good deal of horse-sense one can make a fairly good job of what is after all a matter of very small consequence.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

411. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

413. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

416. “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

417. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

419. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

421. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

430. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

432. “His death had been as futile as his life. He died ingloriously, of a stupid disease, failing once more, even at the end, to accomplish anything.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

433. “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

434. “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

435. “I never ceased to admire the way in which, while he bowed with courtly grace to those exalted personages, he managed to maintain the independent demeanor of the citizen of a country where all men are said to be born equal.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

436. “He could not show his feelings. People told him he was unemotional: but he knew he was at the mercy of his emotions: an accidental kindness touched him so much that sometimes he did not venture to speak in order not to betray the unsteadiness of his will.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “I always think it a pity that, fashion having decided that the doings of the aristocracy are no longer a proper subject for serious fiction, Roy, always keenly sensitive to the tendency of the age, should in his later novels have confined himself to the spiritual, conflicts of solicitors, chartered accountants, and produce brokers. He does not move in these circles with his old assurance.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

441. “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

442. “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

443. “Here was a man who sincerely did not mind what people thought of him, and so convention had no hold on him; he was like a wrestler whose body is oiled; you could not get a grip on him; it gave him a freedom which was an outrage.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

444. “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

445. “What he taught was very simple. He taught that we are all greater than we know and that wisdom is the means to freedom.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

447. “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

448. “She had asked if he was good-looking. ‘No, I don’t think he is,’ answered Margaret, ‘but he’s very paintable.’ ‘That is an answer which has the advantage of sounding well and meaning nothing,’ smiled Susie. She.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

449. “I have noticed that when I am most serious people are apt to laugh at me, and indeed when after a lapse of time I have read passages that I wrote from the fullness of my heart I have been tempted to laugh at myself. 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

450. “A laboratory had been fitted up, army classes were instituted; they all said the character of the school was changing. And heaven only knew what further projects Mr. Perkins turned in that untidy head of his.”

— W. Somerset Maugham