Words matter. These are the best W. Somerset Maugham Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.
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.
The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.
I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.
Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.
It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.
When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.
The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally.
Any nation that thinks more of its ease and comfort than its freedom will soon lose its freedom; and the ironical thing about it is that it will lose its ease and comfort too.
It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.
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.
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.
We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.
Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.
At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.
It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humour.
What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably… have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.
When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right.
At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
The world in general doesn’t know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.
I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.
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.
We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise.
Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.
Writing is the supreme solace.
It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise.
The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
There are two good things in life – freedom of thought and freedom of action.
Tolerance is another word for indifference.
It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.
