W. Somerset Maugham - Sense Quotes

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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
Vaguely, as when you are studying a foreign language and read a page which at first you can make nothing of, till a word or a sentence gives you a clue; and on a sudden suspicion, as it were, of the sense flashes across your troubled wits, vaguely she gained an inkling into the workings of Walter's mind. It was like a dark and ominous landscape seen by a flash of lightning and in a moment hidden again by the night. She shuddered at what she saw.

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
It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic.

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
The passing moment is all we can be sure of; it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it.

W. Somerset Maugham
You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.

W. Somerset Maugham
I don't know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God.

W. Somerset Maugham
Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.

W. Somerset Maugham
Life is really very fantastic, and one has to have a peculiar sense of humor to see the fun of it.

W. Somerset Maugham
I can only guess that it made the world he went back to...strangely without meaning. Though he lived in it, though he even enjoyed it, it remained utterly remote. I think it had lost sense for him. In his heart was the reflection of a lovely dream that he could never quite recall.

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 thought it was only in revealed religion that a mistranslation improved the sense.

W. Somerset Maugham
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.

W. Somerset Maugham