W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

He knew that all things human are transitory and therefore that it must cease one day or another. He looked forward to that day with eager longing. Love was like a parasite in his heart, nourishing a hateful existence on his life's blood; it absorbed his existence so intensely that he could take pleasure in nothing else.

Life is really very fantastic, and one has to have a peculiar sense of humour to see the fun of it. [Virtue]

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

Genius is talent provided with ideals. Genius starves while talent wears purple and fine linen. The man of genius of today will infifty years' time be in most cases no more than a man of talent.

The good traveler has the gift of surprise.

Marco Polo tells the tale of The Old Man in the Mountains and how he recruits new members to his Band of Assassins by means of drugs, beautiful women, lush gardens, and religious promises. The unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

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

There are many foolish people in the world and when a man in a rather high position puts on no frills, slaps them on the back, and tells them he'll do anything in the world for them, they are very likely to think him clever.

I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.

There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood.

The mathematician who after seeing Phedre asked: 'Qu'est que ca prouve?' was not such a fool as he has been generally made out. No one has ever been able to explain why the Doric temple of Paestum is more beautiful than a glass of cold beer except by bringing in considerations that have nothing to do with beauty.

She says it's really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate.

As the cosmos are in place, so be it with your life.

Art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach man humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action.

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes...

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

In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally.

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

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. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan't make the mistakes I've made. When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never had a chance. I'm going to bring up my daughter so that she's free and can stand on her own feet. I´m not going to bring a child into the world, and love her, and bring her up, just so that some man may want to sleep with her so much that he's willing to provide her with board and lodging for the rest of her life.

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.

They say a woman always remembers her first lover with affection; but perhaps she does not always remember him.

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.

Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither.

"Do you like card tricks?" "No, I hate card tricks," I answered. "Well, I`ll just show you this one." He showed me three.

It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.

A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else believes.

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

Success. I don't believe it has any effect on me. For one thing I always expected it.

It does the heart good to look at you.

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.

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

The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

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.

Writing is the supreme solace.

Imagination grows by exercise.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

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

The normal is what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to find them all in a single man is hardly to be expected.

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

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

We have long passed the Victorian Era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.

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?

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.

You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.

In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.

The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind.