A Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

The humorist has a good eye for the humbug; he does not always recognize the saint.

W. Somerset Maugham

Quote Topics

Always Does Eye Good Humbug Humorist Recognize Saint

Quote Author

W. Somerset Maugham
British - Novelist
January 25, 1874 - December 16, 1965

A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it.

P. D. James

The Rose does not preen herself to catch my eye. She blooms because she blooms. A saint is a saint until he knows he is one.

Anthony de Mello

A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing, and so I wanted to have Four Saints who did nothing and I wrote the Four Saints In Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything. Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing something.

Gertrude Stein

He who neither drinks, nor smokes, nor dances, he who preaches & even occasionally practice piety, temperance and celibacy, is generally a saint, or a mahatma or more likely a humbug but he certainly won't make a leader or for that matter a good soldier

Sam Manekshaw

You cannot make a sinner into a saint by killing him. He who does not live as a saint here will never live as a saint hereafter.

Charles Spurgeon

The artist does not see both eyes alike. There is always 'the eye' and the other eye... It adds life and plasticity to the drawing if the eye in the light is darker than the one in the shadow. It gives the head vividness.

John French Sloan

Life catches you by surprise. It always does. But there's good mixed in with the bad. It's there. You just have to recognize it.

Susan Beth Pfeffer

Me and running don’t always see eye to eye. Some days it hurts more than others. But it doesn’t mean I don’t do it. I deal with it and I keep running because not everything that is good for you, always feels good for you.

Lance Armstrong

The good man does not grieve that other people do not recognize his merits. His only anxiety is lest he should fail to recognize theirs.

Confucius

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.

P. J. O'Rourke

To make a man a saint, it must indeed be by grace; and whoever doubts this does not know what a saint is, or a man.

Blaise Pascal

I don't want to be classed as a humorist. It makes me feel guilty. I've never read a good tough quotable female humorist, and I never was one myself. I couldn't do it. A "smartcracker" they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy. There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

Dorothy Parker

May both of them [Saint John XXIII and Saint John Paul II] teach us not to be scandalized by the wounds of Christ and to enter ever more deeply into the mystery of divine mercy, which always hopes and always forgives, because it always loves.

Pope Francis

If a good person does you wrong, act as though you had not noticed it. If we practice and eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon the wholeworld will be blind and toothless.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint.