W. Somerset Maugham quotes
A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her...but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.
Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.
He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice.
I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world.
I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bru
It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late.
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 was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.
It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic.
Life isn't long enough for love and art.
Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present.
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.
Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.
Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.
The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed.
There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.
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.
When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.