W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

"Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Character quotes.

"Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty; the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Happiness quotes.

"Perhaps the most important use of money - It saves time. Life is so short, and there's so much to do, one can't afford to waste a minute; and just think how much you waste, for instance, in walking from place to place instead of going by bus and in going by bus instead of by taxi."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Money quotes.

"The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Truth quotes.

"People ask for criticism, but they only want praise."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Criticism quotes.

"A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Parents quotes.

"Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Change quotes.

"We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Age quotes.

"The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Death quotes.

"The average American can get into the kingdom of heaven much more easily than he can get into the Boulevard St. Germain."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Fashion quotes.

"There are few things so pleasant as a picnic eaten in perfect comfort."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Food quotes.

"It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic."
-W. Somerset Maugham

"All important persons have about them someone in a subordinate position who has their ear. These dependents are very susceptible to slights, and, when they are not treated as they think they should be, will by well-directed shafts, constantly repeated, poison the minds of their patrons against those who have provoked their animosity. It is well to keep in with them."
-W. Somerset Maugham

"I like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Work quotes.

"One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one's soul."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Peace quotes.

"I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Time quotes.

"It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Dignity quotes.

"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."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Books quotes.

"We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights."
-W. Somerset Maugham in God quotes.

"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."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Children quotes.

"People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Writing 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."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Love quotes.

"Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Temptation quotes.

"As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue."
-W. Somerset Maugham

"I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?"
-W. Somerset Maugham in Body quotes.

"He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Money quotes.

"It's always difficult to make conversation with a drunk, and there's no denying it, the sober are at a disadvantage with him."
-W. Somerset Maugham in Drinking quotes.