Best W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.

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.

It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humor.

Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.

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

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Love is what happens to a man and woman who don't know each other.

The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willing avoids the sight of distress.

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

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

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

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

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.

I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.

Perfection has one grave defect. It is apt to be dull.

Perfection is what American women expect to find in their husbands... but English women only hope to find in their butlers.

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

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

There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless.

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

It's a funny thing about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved.

For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.

There are two good things in life -- freedom of thought and freedom of action.

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.

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.

Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. 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.

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 I was young I was amazed at Plutarch's statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

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

The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.

American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.

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.

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

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

No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clich?s that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

No egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul.

Lady Hodmarsh and the duchess immediately assumed the clinging affability that persons of rank assume with their inferiors in order to show them that they are not in the least conscious of any difference in station between them.

I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious . They are scum.

Common sense and nature will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult.

Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.

You can do anything in this world if you are prepares to take the consequences.

It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.

You know that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.