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W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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
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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
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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
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If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it.
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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
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I'm only twenty-five. If I've made a mistake I have time to correct it.
W. Somerset Maugham
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It takes two to make a love affair and a mans meat is too often a woman's poison.
W. Somerset Maugham
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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.
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Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.
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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.
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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
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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.
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By the time an actor knows how to act any sort of part he is often too old to act any but a few.
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Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which this consists.
W. Somerset Maugham
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Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.
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Make him laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured.
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There is no more merit in being able to attach a correct description to a picture than in being able to find out what is wrong with a stalled motorcar. In each case it is special knowledge.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.
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I like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating.
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Comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued; while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly.
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It needs a good deal of philosophy not to be mortified by the thought of persons who have voluntarily abandoned everything that for the most of us makes life worth living and are devoid of envy of what they have missed. I have never made up my mind whether they are fools or wise men.
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When she liked anyone it was quite natural for her to go to bed with him. She never thought twice about it. It was not vice; it wasn't lasciviousness; it was her nature. She gave herself as naturally as the sun gives heat or the flowers their perfume. It was a pleasure to her and she liked to give pleasure to others.
W. Somerset Maugham
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
W. Somerset Maugham
Creative Commons
Born:
January 25, 1874
Died:
December 16, 1965
(aged 91)
Bio:
William Somerset Maugham was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s.
Known for:
Mr. Know-All
The Verger
The Ant and the Grasshopper
The Vessel of Wrath
Most used words:
life
love
man
people
women
loved
find
soul
beauty
thought
god
woman
day
sense
heart
W. Somerset Maugham on Wikipedia
W. Somerset Maugham works on Gutenberg Project
W. Somerset Maugham works on Wikisource
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