Top 504 Quotes & Sayings by W. Somerset Maugham - Page 4

The good traveler has the gift of surprise.

Women are often under the impression that men are much more madly in love with them than they really are.

A state of reverie does not avoid reality, it accedes to reality.

Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.

A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man.

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.

Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence.

The tragedy of love is indifference.

The first duty of a woman is to be pretty, the second is to be well-groomed, and the third is never to contradict.

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes...

It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.

It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest.

You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers. You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you.

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.

It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.

First, cut out all the wisdom, then cut out all the adjectives.

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

No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.

Almost all the people who’ve had the most effect on me I seem to have met by chance, yet looking back it seems as though I couldn’t but have met them.

Imagination grows by exercise.

The humour of Dostoievsky is the humour of a barloafer who ties a kettle to a dog's tail.

Women's hearts are like old china, none the worse for a break or two.

For men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and they are not the very interesting ones; even women, with whom the subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for them.

I have always been convinced that if a woman once made up her mind to marry a man, nothing but instant flight could save him.

I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the center of the world.

It is a nuisance that knowledge can only be acquired by hard work.

Look after your laundry, and your soul will look after itself.

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

It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.

Evil is a necessary part of the order of the universe.

When people say they do not care what others think of them, for the most part they deceive themselves. Generally they mean only that they will do as they choose, in the confidence that no one will know their vagaries; and at the utmost only that they are willing to act contrary to the opinion of the majority because they are supported by the approval of their neighbours. It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.

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.

Self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion.

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.

I am sick of this way of life. The weariness and sadness of old age make it intolerable. I have walked with death in hand, and death's own hand is warmer than my own. I don't wish to live any longer.

There is no cruelty greater than a woman's to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an insane irritation.

The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.

Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.

It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.

A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.

Refecting on the high divorce rate in America as contrasted with England "American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers

Beauty is also a Gift of God, one of the most rare and precious, and we should be thankful if we are happy enough to possess it and thankful, if we are not, that others possess it for our pleasure.

We Americans... like change. It is at once our weakness and our strength.

Charm and nothing but charm at last grows a little tiresome. It's a relief then to deal with a man who isn't quite so delightful but a little more sincere.

Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither.

When things are at their worst, I find something always happens.

Success. I don't believe it has any effect on me. For one thing I always expected it.

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

Advice to first year medical students: In anatomy, it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.

A man filled with meat turns his back on the dry bones of political doctrine. Fanatical devotion to the ruling party comes more readily from the materially deprived At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.

"Do you like card tricks?" "No, I hate card tricks," I answered. "Well, I`ll just show you this one." He showed me three.

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.

I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.

Men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves.

If only the good were a little less heavy-footed

I was a stray acquaintance whom he had never seem before and would never see again, a wandered for a moment through his monotonous life, and some starved impulse left him to lay bare his soul. I have in this way learned more about men in a night than I could if I had known them for 10 years. If you are interested in human nature, it is one of the greatest pleasures of travel.

Affection is created by habit, community of interests, convenience and the desire of companionship. It is a comfort rather than an exhilaration.

Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more than the opium of an intelligentsia.

Life is really very fantastic, and one has to have a peculiar sense of humour to see the fun of it. [Virtue]