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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

406. “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

407. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

409. “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

410. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

414. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

429. “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

430. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

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. “The idealist withdrew himself, because he could not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had not the strength to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain, and since his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled himself with despising his fellows.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

438. “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

439. “Everything was soft about her, her voice, her smile, her laugh; her eyes, which were small and pale, had the softness of flowers; her manner was as soft as the summer rain.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

440. “And they had a fairly pleasant time in Pretoria. Eventually, I believe, wars will be quite bloodless; rival armies will perambulate, and whenever one side has got into a good position, the other will surrender wholesale.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

441. “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

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

443. “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

444. “They had furtive eyes and weak chins. There was no wickedness in them, but only pettiness and vulgarity.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

445. “She had a wild impulse to seize the stout, good-natured nun by the shoulders and shake her, crying: “Don’t you know that I’m a human being, unhappy and alone, and I want comfort and sympathy and encouragement; oh, can’t you turn a minute away from God and give me a little compassion; not the Christian compassion that you have for all suffering things, but just human compassion for me?”

— W. Somerset Maugham

446. “Her pain was so great that she could have screamed at the top of her voice. She had never known that one could suffer so much; and she asked herself desperately what she had done to deserve it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

447. “Don’t talk to me about the country. The doctor said I was to go there for six weeks last summer. It nearly killed me, I give you my word. The noise of it. All them birds singin’ all the time, and the cocks crowin’ and the cows mooin’. I couldn’t stick it. When you’ve lived all the years I ’ave in peace and quietness you can’t get used to all that racket goin’ on all the time.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

448. “Mary Ann did not like Miss Wilkinson and called her an old cat.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

449. “No pain in love is so hard to bear as that which comes from the impossibility of doing any service from the well-beloved, and no service is so repulsive that love cannot make it delightful and easy.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

450. “I did not believe him capable of love. That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness either for himself or for others; there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to protect, an eagerness to do good and to give pleasure – if not unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence.”

— W. Somerset Maugham