Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMNow 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.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?
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Failure make people bitter and cruel. Success improves the character of the man.
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Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.
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Impropriety is the soul of wit.
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I’ll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell… their heart’s in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ.
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To 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.
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The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
For my part I cannot believe in a God who is angry with me because I do not believe in him. I cannot believe in a God who is less tolerant than I. I cannot believe in a God who has neither humour nor common sense.
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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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The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.
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I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
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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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He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
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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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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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Oh, it is dreadfully bitter to look at a woman whom you have loved with all your heart and soul, so that you felt you could not bear to let her out of your sight, and realize that you would not mind if you never saw her again. The tragedy of love is indifference.
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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.
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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.
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There are two good things in life – freedom of thought and freedom of action.
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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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The essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity.
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How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and you were my whole life. It is not very pleasant to realize that to you it was only an episode.
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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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There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.
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Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM