W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

354 Sourced Quotes

No man in his heart is quite so cynical as a well-bred woman.

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

W. Somerset Maugham
An art is only great and significant if it is one that all may enjoy. The art of a clique is but a plaything.

W. Somerset Maugham
A good story is obviously a difficult thing to invent, but its difficulty is a poor reason for despising it.

W. Somerset Maugham
The audience is a very curious animal. It is shrewd rather than intelligent. Its mental capacity is less than that of its most intellectual members.

W. Somerset Maugham
Because a man can write great works he is none the less a man.

W. Somerset Maugham
So long as some are strong and some are weak, the weak will be driven to the wall.

W. Somerset Maugham
Perhaps the most important use of money - It saves time. Life is so short, and there's so much to do, one can't afford to waste a minute; and just think how much you waste, for instance, in walking from place to place instead of going by bus and in going by bus instead of by taxi.

W. Somerset Maugham
The Almighty can hardly be such a fool as the churches make out.

W. Somerset Maugham
There's nothing the world loves more than a ready-made description which they can hang on to a man, and so save themselves all trouble in future.

W. Somerset Maugham
It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.

W. Somerset Maugham
The medical profession is the only one which a man may enter at any age with some chance of making a living.

W. Somerset Maugham
A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.

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
The arguments for immortality, weak when you take them one by one, are no more cogent when you take them together... For my part, I cannot see how consciousness can persist when its physical basis has been destroyed, and I am too sure of the interconnection of my body and my mind to think that any survival of my my consciousness apart from my body would be in any sense a survival of myself.

W. Somerset Maugham
I'm only twenty-five. If I've made a mistake I have time to correct it.

W. Somerset Maugham
It takes two to make a love affair and a mans meat is too often a woman's poison.

W. Somerset Maugham
You will have to learn many tedious things... which you will forget the moment you have passed your final examination, but in anatomy it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.

W. Somerset Maugham
Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.

W. Somerset Maugham
When a man's in love, he at once makes a pedestal of the Ten Commandments and stands on the top of them with his arms akimbo. When a woman's in love she doesn't care two straws for Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not.

W. Somerset Maugham
There are directors who desire to be artistic. It is pathetic to compare the seriousness of their aim with the absurdity of their attainment.

W. Somerset Maugham
People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are.

W. Somerset Maugham
The spirit is often most free when the body is satiated with pleasure; indeed, sometimes the stars shine more brightly seen from the gutter than from the hilltop.

W. Somerset Maugham
Comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued; while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly.

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
No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.

W. Somerset Maugham
The inclination to digress is human. But the dramatist must avoid it even more strenuously than the saint must avoid sin, for while sin may be venial, digression is mortal.

W. Somerset Maugham
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 or 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.

W. Somerset Maugham
Make him laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured.

W. Somerset Maugham
Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which this consists.

W. Somerset Maugham