Top 504 Quotes & Sayings by W. Somerset Maugham - Page 8

Why did you look at the sunset?' Philip answered with his mouth full: Because I was happy.

The value of culture is its effect on character. It avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens that. Its use is for life. Its aim is not beauty but goodness.

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.

The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel.

When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.

Some American delusions: 1) That there is no class-consciousness in the country. 2) That American coffee is good. 3) That Americans are business-like. 4) That Americans are highly-sexed and that redheads are more highly sexed than others.

She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her.

The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery as soon as possible.

There is no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to be able to tell you what mutton tastes like. It is enough if he eats a cutlet. But he should do that.

The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain, just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes.

When married people don't get on they can separate, but if they're not married it's impossible. It's a tie that only death can sever.

People are always a little disconcerted when you don't recognize them, they are so important to themselves, it is a shock to discover of what small importance they are to others. [The human element]

The officers saluted as she passed and gravely bowed. They walked back across the courtyard and got into their chairs. She saw Waddington light a cigarette. A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man.

Sometimes the road was only a lane, with thick hawthorne hedges, and the green elms overhung it on either side so that when you looked up there was only a strip of blue sky between. And as you rode along in the warm, keen air you had a sensation that the world was standing still and life would last forever. Although you were pedaling with such energy you had a delicious feeling of laziness.

Do you absolutely despise me, Walter?" "No." He hesitated and his voice was strange. "I despise myself.

Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can.

The end of culture is right living

But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design.

I happen to think we’ve set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.

A good story is obviously a difficult thing to invent, but its difficulty is a poor reason for despising it.

I like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating.

and he loved her suddenly because she loved him.

Freedom! That was the thought that sung in her heart so that even though the future was so dim, it was iridescent like the mist over the river where the morning sun fell upon it. Freedom! Not only freedom from a bond that irked, and a companionship which depressed her; freedom, not only from the death which had threatened, but freedom from the love that had degraded her; freedom from all spiritual ties, the freedom of a disembodied spirit, and with freedom, courage , and a valiant unconcern for whatever was to come.

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.

Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.

You've been brought up like a gentleman and a Christian, and I should be false to the trust laid upon me by your dead father and mother if I allowed you to expose yourself to such temptation.' Well, I know I'm not a Christian and I'm beginning to doubt whether I'm a gentleman,' said Philip.

It does the heart good to look at you.

There was once a professor of law who said to his students. When you are fighting a case, if you have facts on your side hammer them into the jury, and if you have the law on your side hammer it into the judge. But if you have neither the facts nor the law, asked one of his listeners? Then hammer the hell into the table, answered the professor.

So long as some are strong and some are weak, the weak will be driven to the wall.

I know that you're selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know that you haven't the nerve of a rabbit, I know you're a liar and a humbug, I know that you're utterly contemptible. And the tragic part is'--her face was on a sudden distraught with pain--'the tragic part is that notwithstanding I love you with all my heart.

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.

The inclination to digress is human. But the dramatist must avoid it even more strenuously than the saint must avoid sin, for while sin may be venial, digression is mortal.

Cronshaw stopped for a moment to drink. He had pondered for twenty years the problem whether he loved liquor because it made him talk or whether he loved conversation because it made him thirsty.

Sherry, the civilized drink.

When some incident has shattered the career you’ve mapped out for yourself, a folly, a crime or a misfortune, you mustn’t think you’re down and out. It may be a stroke of luck, and when you look back years later you may say to yourself that you wouldn’t for anything in the world exchange the new life disaster has forced upon you for the dull, humdrum existence you would have led if circumstances hadn’t intervened.

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.

The great critic … must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it.

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.

In heaven, when the blessed use the telephone they will say what they have to say and not a word besides.

The worst of having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were acting naturally or being tactful too. [The human element]

By the time an actor knows how to act any sort of part he is often too old to act any but a few.

There are men who are possessed by an urge so strong to do some particular thing that they can't help themselves, they've got to do it. They're prepared to sacrifice everything to satisfy their yearning.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

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

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

Are you sure you can prevent yourself from falling in love one of these days? Such things do happen, you know, even to the most prudent men.' Simon gave him a strange, one might even have thought a hostile, look. I should tear it out of my heart as I'd wrench out of my mouth a rotten tooth.

He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other.

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

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.

Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom.

The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so.

It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule.

He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her.

When she liked anyone it was quite natural for her to go to bed with him. She never thought twice about it. It was not vice; it wasn't lasciviousness; it was her nature. She gave herself as naturally as the sun gives heat or the flowers their perfume. It was a pleasure to her and she liked to give pleasure to others.

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.

A woman may be as wicked as she likes, but if she isn't pretty it won't do her much good.

There are directors who desire to be artistic. It is pathetic to compare the seriousness of their aim with the absurdity of their attainment.

I knew that suffering did not enoble; it degraded. It made men selfish, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things...it made them less than men; and I wrote ferociously that we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.

Has it occurred to you that transmigration is at once an explanation and a justification of the evil of the world? If the evils we suffer are the result of sins committed in our past lives, we can bear them with resignation and hope that if in this one we strive toward virtue out future lives will be less afflicted.