Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMLife isn’t long enough for love and art.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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Now it is a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. If you utterly decline to make do with what you can get, then somehow or other, you are very likely to get what you want.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
if you’d ever had a grown-up daughter you’d know that by comparison a bucking steer is easy to manage. And as to knowing what goes on inside her – well, it’s much better to pretend you’re the simple, innocent old fool she almost certainly takes you for.
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 -
To bear failure with courage is the best proof of character that anyone can give.
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 -
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 -
Tolerance is only another name for indifference.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Impropriety is the soul of wit.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Any society that values wealth above freedom will lose its freedom, and will ultimately lose its wealth as well
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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
From the earliest time the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Don’t wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM