The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMDon’t wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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Unfortunately sometimes one can’t do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.
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There are two good things in life – freedom of thought and freedom of action.
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Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain.
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The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
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The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.
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There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one’s means of livelihood.
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Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.
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The Almighty can hardly be such a fool as the churches make out.
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It’s no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.
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People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force; and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity.
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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.
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A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there’s only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.
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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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If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.
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Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.
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But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realized that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature.
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Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.
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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.
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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.
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Oh, it’s always the same,’ she sighed, ‘if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.
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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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It wasn’t until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say, ‘I don’t know.’
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I personally prefer freedom of thought. But in England you get neither: you’re ground down by convention. You can’t think as you like and you can’t act as you like. That’s because it’s a democratic nation. I expect America’s worse.
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The well dressed man is he whose clothes you never notice
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People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
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Men seek but one thing in life — their pleasure.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM