Quotes By W. Somerset Maugham

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 are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.

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.

Have common sense and stick to the point.

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

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.

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.

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

Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.

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.

Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

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.

Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequence than to have a really affectionate mother.

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

Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.

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.

We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.

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

The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.

It wasn't until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say "I don't know."

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

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

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

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.

We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.

Impropriety is the soul of wit.

People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.

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.