The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMWhen 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.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.
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If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.
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Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.
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The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.
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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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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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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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We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.
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What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?
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You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.
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He is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.
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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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If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM