W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

354 Sourced Quotes

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
You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent.

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

W. Somerset Maugham
Women are often under the impression that men are much more madly in love with them than they really are.

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

W. Somerset Maugham
Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.

W. Somerset Maugham
In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do.

W. Somerset Maugham
The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you.

W. Somerset Maugham
It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.

W. Somerset Maugham
It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.

W. Somerset Maugham
When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it.

W. Somerset Maugham
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

W. Somerset Maugham
I have been forced to conclude from this that we know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.

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

W. Somerset Maugham
I know that you're selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know that you haven't the nerve of a rabbit, I know you're a liar and a humbug, I know that you're utterly contemptible. And the tragic part is'—her face was on a sudden distraught with pain—'the tragic part is that notwithstanding I love you with all my heart.

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

W. Somerset Maugham
However harmless a thing is, if the law forbids it most people will think it wrong.

W. Somerset Maugham
If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it.

W. Somerset Maugham