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 MAUGHAMIf forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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 -
Any society that values wealth above freedom will lose its freedom, and will ultimately lose its wealth as well
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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.
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 -
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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
It was such a beautiful day I decided to stay in bed.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Dullness is the first requisite of a good husband.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
You’re intoxicated by the boundless space.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM