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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMTo recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.
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He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
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Tolerance is only another name for indifference.
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The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan’t make the mistakes I’ve made.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they?
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
I wish I could make you see how exciting the life of the spirit is and how rich in experience. It’s illimitable. It’s such a happy life. There’s only one thing like it, when you’re up in a plane by yourself, high, high, and only infinity surrounds you.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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 -
We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.
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Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
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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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The tragedy of love is not death or separation. How long do you think it would have been before one or other of them ceased to care?
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
When a woman loves you she’s not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she’s weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
I’d sooner be smashed into a mangled pulp by a bus when we cross the street than look forward to a life like yours.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Life isn’t long enough for love and art.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM