W. Somerset Maugham - Find Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

View all W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
We find things beautiful because we recognize them and contrariwise we find things beautiful because their novelty surprises us.

W. Somerset Maugham
If to look truth in the face and not resent it when it is unpalatable, and take human nature as you find it, smiling when it's absurd and grieved without exaggeration when it's pitiful, is to be cynical, then I suppose I'm a cynic.

W. Somerset Maugham
Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.

W. Somerset Maugham
Don't you know? Because American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.

W. Somerset Maugham
The normal is what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to find them all in a single man is hardly to be expected.

W. Somerset Maugham
Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.

W. Somerset Maugham
You know, when one's in love,' I said, 'and things go all wrong, one's terribly unhappy and one thinks one won't ever get over it. But you'll be astounded to learn what the sea will do.' What do you mean?' she smiled. Well, love isn't a good sailor and it languishes on a sea voyage. You'll be surprised when you have the Atlantic between you and Larry to find how slight the pang is that before you sailed seemed intolerable.

W. Somerset Maugham
One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one's soul.

W. Somerset Maugham
The last words he said to me when I bade him good-night were: Tell Amy it's no good coming after me. Anyhow, I shall change my hotel, so she wouldn't be able to find me.' My own impression is that she's well rid of you,' I said. My dear fellow, I only hope you'll be able to make her see it. But women are very unintelligent.

W. Somerset Maugham
I think I was a little disappointed in her. I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do now, and I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. I did not realize how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in the same human heart.

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

W. Somerset Maugham
It is astonishing how many books I find there is no need for me to read at all.

W. Somerset Maugham
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.

W. Somerset Maugham