W. Somerset Maugham - Man Quotes

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Man's desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy (conscience) within his gates; and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd.

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
A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden.

W. Somerset Maugham
One does not really feel much grief at other people's sorrows; one tries, and puts on a melancholy face, thinking oneself brutal for not caring more; but one cannot and it is better, for if one grieved too deeply at other people's tears, life would be unendurable; and every man has sufficient sorrows of his own without taking to heart his neighbour's.

W. Somerset Maugham
We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.

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
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
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
For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.

W. Somerset Maugham
She loved three things — a joke, a glass of wine, and a handsome man.

W. Somerset Maugham
After all, a man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.

W. Somerset Maugham
A man ought to work. That's what he's here for. That's how he contributes to the welfare of the community.

W. Somerset Maugham
He was always seeking for a meaning in life, and here it seemed to him that a meaning was offered; but it was obscure and vague. He was profoundly troubled. He saw what looked like the truth as by flashes of lightning on a dark, stormy night you might see a mountain range. He seemed to see that a man need not leave his life to chance, but that his will was powerful; he seemed to see that self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion; he seemed to see that the inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich with experience, as the life of one who conquered realms and explored unknown lands.

W. Somerset Maugham
There are many foolish people in the world and when a man in a rather high position puts on no frills, slaps them on the back, and tells them he'll do anything in the world for them, they are very likely to think him clever.

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

W. Somerset Maugham
What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?

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

W. Somerset Maugham
There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.

W. Somerset Maugham
If a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him, it's his fault, not hers.

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
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
Art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach man humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action.

W. Somerset Maugham