Top 504 Quotes & Sayings by W. Somerset Maugham - Page 9

There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed.

It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.

I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?

Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.

Through the history of the world there have always been exploiters and exploited. There always will be ... because the great mass of men are made by nature to be slaves, they are unfit to control themselves, and for their own good need masters.

D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.

She was a fool and he knew it and because he loved her it had made no difference.

And I have the sunset, and the Tuscan wine, and the white teeth of the women in Rome. I am a traveler in Romance.

The artist can within limits make what he likes of his life... It is only the artist, and maybe the criminal, who can make his own.

The nature of men and women - their essential nature - is so vile and despicable that if you were to portray a person as he really is, no one would believe you.

If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be as overpopulated as it is now.

I promised myself that if ever I had some money that I would savor a cigar each day after lunch and dinner. This is the only resolution of my youth that I have kept, and the only realized ambition which has not brought disillusion.

It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony.

Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness.

By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.

You will have to learn many tedious things,...which you will forget the moment you have passed your final examination, but in anatomy it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.

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

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.

The ideas for stories that thronged my brain would not let me rest till I had got rid of them by writing them.

Was it necessary to tell me that you wanted nothing in the world but me?' The corners of his mouth drooped peevishly. Oh, my dear, it's rather hard to take quite literally the things a man says when he's in love with you.' Didn't you mean them?' At the moment.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

Writing is a wholetime job: no professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it.

Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.

It was like making a blunder at a party; there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it.