Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMIf a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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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Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly?
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The Almighty can hardly be such a fool as the churches make out.
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I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
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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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Tolerance is only another name for indifference.
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The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.
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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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People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
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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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We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.
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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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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.
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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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Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM