Top 504 Quotes & Sayings by W. Somerset Maugham - Page 5

Only mediocre people are at the best all the time.

An art is only great and significant if it is one that all may enjoy. The art of a clique is but a plaything.

I've met so many people, often the scum of the earth, and found them, you know, quite decent. I am an uncomfortable stranger to moral indignation.

I [Death] was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

You're beginning to dislike me, aren't you? Well, dislike me. It doesn't make any difference to me now.

A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else believes.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe.

To bear failure with courage is the best proof of character that anyone can give... You will find that people forget the failures of others very quickly.... My last piece of advice is not to let anyone see your mortification, but whatever you fancy people are saying about you to go on with your ordinary life as though nothing unpleasant had happened to you.

The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and 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.

I am afraid of people with too much charm. They devour you. In the end you are made a sacrifice to the exercise of their fascinating gift and their insincerity.

She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.

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

Perfect is determined in shortened measures of time, not over long periods of time or lifetimes. It would be unnatural.

An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.

In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do.

Make him laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured.

As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue.

She [Sadie Thompson] gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer. "You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!"

Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which this consists.

I prefer a loose woman to a selfish one and a wanton to a fool.

There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth of the valley.

She’s wonderful. Tell her I’ve never seen such beautiful hands. I wonder what she sees in you.” Waddington, smiling, translated the question. “She says I’m good.” “As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue,” Kitty mocked.

I know that I shall die struggling for breath, and I know that I shall be horribly afraid. I know that I shall not be able to keep myself from regretting bitterly the life that has brought me to such a pass; but I disown that regret. I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.

I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.

I don't understand anything. Life is so strange. I feel like some one who's lived all his life by a duck-pond and suddenly is shown the sea. It makes me a little breathless, and yet it fills me with elation. I don't want to die, I want to live. I'm beginning to feel a new courage. I feel like one of those old sailors who set sail for undiscovered seas and I think my soul hankers for the unknown.

We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing, too

No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.

[Money] is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.

We do not write as we want, but as we can.

A good rule for writers: do not explain overmuch.

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos.

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

Its a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, few are chosen.

Comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued; while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly.

Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty; the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding.

I never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.

It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.

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

In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.

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

The secret of play-writing can be given in two maxims: stick to the point, and, whenever you can, cut.

You can never know enough about your characters

Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.

Yet magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.

Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.

What mean and cruel things men can do for the love of God.

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

I wonder how anyone can have the face to condemn others when he reflects upon his own thoughts.

On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it, so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment.

Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs.

The best style is the style you don't notice.

It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late. It does not improve the temper.

You must not pursue a success, but fly from it.

You see, money to you means freedom; to me it means bondage.

No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.

You cannot write well or much (and I venture the opinion that you cannot write well unless you write much) unless you form a habit.

Illusions are like umbrellas - you no sooner get them than you lose them, and the loss always leaves a little painful wound.

A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?

For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay.