Famous Quotes

Quotes by W Somerset Maugham

• A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.
• 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.
• Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.
• At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
• Beauty is an ecstasy it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.
• Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.
• Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
• Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
• 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.
• If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?
• If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.
• Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
• In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally.
• It is not true that suffering ennobles the character happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
• It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.
• It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humour.
• It's a funny thing about life if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
• 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.
• Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.
• Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it's a mistake to make a habit out of it.
• Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature and the error is ineradicable.
• Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
• Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.
• Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
• Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
• Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
• The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.
• 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.
• The crown of literature is poetry.
• The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.
• 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.
• There are two good things in life - freedom of thought and freedom of action.
• 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.
• What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.
• When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.
• You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.
• 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.