In France you get freedom of action: you can do what you like and nobody bothers, but you must think like everybody else. In Germany you must do what everybody else does, but you may think as you choose. They’re both very good things.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMI 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.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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 -
I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don’t.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.
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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 -
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 -
What does democracy come down to? The persuasive power of slogans invented by wily self-seeking politicians.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.
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 -
The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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?
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.
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An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.
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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






