W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

354 Sourced Quotes

He found that it was easy to make a heroic gesture, but hard to abide by its results.

W. Somerset Maugham
He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her.

W. Somerset Maugham
The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.

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
From old habit, unconsciously he thanked God that he no longer believed in Him.

W. Somerset Maugham
It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humor.

W. Somerset Maugham
The essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity.

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

W. Somerset Maugham
There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood... Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.

W. Somerset Maugham
When some incident has shattered the career you've mapped out for yourself, a folly, a crime or a misfortune, you mustn't think you're down and out. It may be a stroke of luck, and when you look back years later you may say to yourself that you wouldn't for anything in the world exchange the new life disaster has forced upon you for the dull, humdrum existence you would have led if circumstances hadn't intervened.

W. Somerset Maugham
It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.

W. Somerset Maugham
The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery as soon as possible.

W. Somerset Maugham
I did not believe him capable of love. That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness either for himself or for others; there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to protect, an eagerness to do good and to give pleasure—if not unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence.

W. Somerset Maugham
'I sometimes think,' said the Eternal, 'that the stars never shine more brightly than when reflected in the muddy waters of a wayside ditch.'

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

W. Somerset Maugham
A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.

W. Somerset Maugham
He knew that all things human are transitory and therefore that it must cease one day or another. He looked forward to that day with eager longing. Love was like a parasite in his heart, nourishing a hateful existence on his life's blood; it absorbed his existence so intensely that he could take pleasure in nothing else.

W. Somerset Maugham
The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

W. Somerset Maugham
I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to the universities go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene…They are scum.

W. Somerset Maugham
All important persons have about them someone in a subordinate position who has their ear. These dependents are very susceptible to slights, and, when they are not treated as they think they should be, will by well-directed shafts, constantly repeated, poison the minds of their patrons against those who have provoked their animosity. It is well to keep in with them.

W. Somerset Maugham
The Americans... have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.

W. Somerset Maugham
It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me.

W. Somerset Maugham
There are men whose sense of humour is so ill developed that they still bear a grudge against Copernicus because he dethroned them from the central position in the universe. They feel it a personal affront that they can no longer consider themselves the pivot upon which turns the whole of created things.

W. Somerset Maugham
I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.

W. Somerset Maugham
She had a very agreeable smile; it did not light up her face suddenly, but seemed rather to suffuse it by degrees with charm. It hesitated for a moment about her lips and then slowly travelled to those great shining eyes of hers and there softly lingered.

W. Somerset Maugham