W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

She [Sadie Thompson] gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer. "You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!"

The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.

It must be that to govern a nation you need a specific talent and that this may very well exist without general ability.

There are men whose sense of humour is so ill developed that they still bear a grudge against Copernicus because he dethroned them from the central position in the universe. They feel it a personal affront that they can no longer consider themselves the pivot upon which turns the whole of created things.

A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.

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

Its a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, few are chosen.

She alone had been blind to his merit. Why? Because he loved her and she did not love him. What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?

If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.

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

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

My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.

You Europeans know nothing about America. Because we amass large fortunes you think we care for nothing but money. We are nothing for it; the moment we have it we spend it, sometimes well, sometimes ill, but we spend it. Money is nothing to us; it's merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that 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.

From the earliest time the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.

It is bad enough to know the past; it would be intolerable to know the future.

You know, when one's in love,' I said, 'and things go all wrong, one's terribly unhappy and one thinks one won't ever get over it. But you'll be astounded to learn what the sea will do.' What do you mean?' she smiled. Well, love isn't a good sailor and it languishes on a sea voyage. You'll be surprised when you have the Atlantic between you and Larry to find how slight the pang is that before you sailed seemed intolerable.

Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination; it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it.

With the superciliousness of extreme youth, I put thirty-five as the utmost limit at which a man might fall in love without making a fool of himself.

There is only one way to win hearts and that is to make oneself like unto those of whom one would be loved.

One does not really feel much grief at other people's sorrows; one tries, and puts on a melancholy face, thinking oneself brutal for not caring more; but one cannot and it is better, for if one grieved too deeply at other people's tears, life would be unendurable; and every man has sufficient sorrows of his own without taking to heart his neighbour's.

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

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

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.

No man in his heart is quite so cynical as a well-bred woman.

Tolerance is only another name for indifference.

If only the good were a little less heavy-footed

The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.

A man ought to work. That's what he's here for. That's how he contributes to the welfare of the community.

I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.

An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

No action is in itself good or bad, but only such according to convention.

The essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity.

A good Havana is one of the best pleasures that I know.

Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.

People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force; and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.

Illusions are like umbrellas - you no sooner get them than you lose them, and the loss always leaves a little painful wound.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

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

It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.

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.

[Money] is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.

Considering how foolishly people act and how pleasantly they prattle, perhaps it would be better for the world if they talked more and did less.

It takes two to make a love affair and a mans meat is too often a woman's poison.

The audience is not the least important actor in the play and if it will not do its allotted share the play falls to pieces.

I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul's good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Women's hearts are like old china, none the worse for a break or two.

She had no mercy. He looked at her neck and thought how he would like to jab it with the knife he had for his muffin. He knew enough anatomy to make pretty certain of getting the carotid artery. And at the same time he wanted to cover her pale, thin face with kisses.