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
You know that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.

W. Somerset Maugham
One does not really feel much grief at other people's sorrows; one tries, and puts on a melancholy face, thinking oneself brutal for not caring more; but one cannot and it is better, for if one grieved too deeply at other people's tears, life would be unendurable; and every man has sufficient sorrows of his own without taking to heart his neighbour's.

W. Somerset Maugham
No egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul.

W. Somerset Maugham
We Americans... like change. It is at once our weakness and our strength.

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
And I have the sunset, and the Tuscan wine, and the white teeth of the women in Rome. I am a traveler in Romance.

W. Somerset Maugham
Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.

W. Somerset Maugham
I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos.

W. Somerset Maugham
When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.

W. Somerset Maugham
…we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.

W. Somerset Maugham
…when you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right…

W. Somerset Maugham
A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden.

W. Somerset Maugham
The Riviera isn't only a sunny place for shady people.

W. Somerset Maugham
People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force; and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.

W. Somerset Maugham
This love was a torment, and he resented bitterly the subjugation in which it held him; he was a prisoner and he longed for freedom. Sometimes he awoke in the morning and felt nothing; his soul leaped, for he thought he was free; he loved no longer; but in a little while, as he grew wide awake, the pain settled in his heart, and he knew that he was not cured yet.

W. Somerset Maugham
There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth of the valley.

W. Somerset Maugham
I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't.

W. Somerset Maugham
He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other.

W. Somerset Maugham
But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design.

W. Somerset Maugham
Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.

W. Somerset Maugham
She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer.
"You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!"

W. Somerset Maugham
I wish I could make you see how much fuller the life I offer you is than anything you have a conception of. I wish I could make you see how exciting the life of the spirit is and how rich in experience. It's illimitable. It's such a happy life. There's only one thing like it, when you're up in a plane by yourself, high, high, and only infinity surrounds you. You're intoxicated by the boundless space.

W. Somerset Maugham
It is one of the defects of my character that I cannot altogether dislike anyone who makes me laugh.

W. Somerset Maugham
Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.

W. Somerset Maugham
As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.

W. Somerset Maugham
Life is really very fantastic, and one has to have a peculiar sense of humor to see the fun of it.

W. Somerset Maugham
Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

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
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life.

W. Somerset Maugham