Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMTo 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.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
I personally prefer freedom of thought. But in England you get neither: you’re ground down by convention. You can’t think as you like and you can’t act as you like. That’s because it’s a democratic nation. I expect America’s worse.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Most people are such fools that it is really no great compliment to say that someone is above the average.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there’s only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
She loved three things – a joke, a glass of wine, and a handsome man.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognize the inevitable selfishness of humanity.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one’s means of livelihood.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one’s soul.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never had a chance. I’m going to bring up my daughter so that she’s free and can stand on her own feet.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM