They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMThere are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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 -
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 -
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 -
I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
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 a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
What does democracy come down to? The persuasive power of slogans invented by wily self-seeking politicians.
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