A Quote by W. Somerset Maugham
Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
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Peter was dull; he was at first Dull; - Oh, so dull - so very dull! Whether he talked, wrote, or rehearsed - Still with his dulness was he cursed - Dull -beyond all conception - dull.
To cowards what advice shall I offer? - nothing whatsoever have I to say.
Whatsoever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.
Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sight seers.
It seems that bad advice that's fun will always be better known than than good advice that's dull-no matter how useless that fun advice is.
The Christian religion, then, is not an affair of preaching, or prating, or ranting, but of taking care of the bodies as well as the souls of people; not an affair of belief and of faith and of professions, but an affair of doing good, and especially to those who are in want; not an affair of fire and brimstone, but an affair of bacon and bread, beer and a bed.
Remember: whatsoever I am saying is not the thing that I want to say to you. Whatsoever I am saying has nothing to do with truth, because truth cannot be said. Whatsoever I am saying is nothing but a hammering. If you become awake, you will see the truth.
If you were the wall, what would you rather be? Dreary and dull, or alive with paint?" "Walls can't think!" "That doesn't stop them from caring.
... I had a latent impression that there was something decidedly fine in Mr. Wopsle's elocution - not for old associations' sake, I am afraid, but because it was very slow, very dreary, very up-hill and down-hill, and very unlike any way in which any man in any natural circumstances of life or death ever expressed himself about anything.
We travellers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what has been said before us, we are dull and have observed nothing. If we tell anything new, we are laughed at as fabulous and romantic.
Death is not regarded as a natural affair by primitive man. Death is believed to be due to the intervention of some malevolent or at least not well disposed power. Normally it should not take place. So we have all through history crude explanations of death, as e.g., the influence of the serpent, the devil, sin.
If we insist that public life be reserved for those whose personal history is pristine, we are not going to get paragons of virtue running our affairs. We will get the very rich, who contract out the messy things in life the very dull, who have nothing to hide and nothing to show and the very devious, expert at covering their tracks and ambitious enough to risk their discovery.
Now I will give you a piece of advice. I will tell you something that I absolutely believe you should do, and if you do not do it you will never be a witer. It is a certain truth. When your pencil is dull, sharpen it. And when your pencil is sharp, use it until it is dull again.
The difference between art about death and actual death is that one's a celebration and the other's a dull fact.
I'm very wary about giving advice. I think it's very dangerous to give advice to people, except if you know them very well.
Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. He had never found happiness dull. It always seemed more exciting than any other thing and capable of as great intensity as sorrow to those people who were capable of having it.
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