W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

354 Sourced Quotes

Now it is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it...

W. Somerset Maugham
It is very natural that clever young men should be rather odious. They are conscious of gifts that they do not know how to use. They are exasperated with the world that will not recognize their merit. They have something to give, and no hand is stretched out to receive it. They are impatient for the fame they regard as their due.

W. Somerset Maugham
The great critic … must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

W. Somerset Maugham
For the complete life, the perfect pattern includes old age as well as youth and maturity.

W. Somerset Maugham
Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.

W. Somerset Maugham
I like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating.

W. Somerset Maugham
He found himself now in the agreeable situation of being able to do what was best for others and at the same time what was convenient to himself.

W. Somerset Maugham
What does democracy come down to? The persuasive power of slogans invented by wily self-seeking politicians.

W. Somerset Maugham
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
It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise…

W. Somerset Maugham
But the only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you; it may have other and much more profound meanings for the critic, but at second-hand they can be of small service to you.

W. Somerset Maugham
A good style should show no sign of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.

W. Somerset Maugham
The trouble with our younger authors is that they are all in the sixties.

W. Somerset Maugham
After all, a man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.

W. Somerset Maugham
He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.

W. Somerset Maugham
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
The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so.

W. Somerset Maugham
You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance, and the humorist, with a smile and perhaps a sigh, is more likely to shrug his shoulders than to condemn.

W. Somerset Maugham
You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers. You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you.

W. Somerset Maugham
The secret of play-writing can be given in two maxims: stick to the point, and, whenever you can, cut.

W. Somerset Maugham
Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.

W. Somerset Maugham
I thought it was only in revealed religion that a mistranslation improved the sense.

W. Somerset Maugham
For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.

W. Somerset Maugham
I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.

W. Somerset Maugham
We have long passed the Victorian Era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.

W. Somerset Maugham