Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMYou demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they?
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one’s life with her.
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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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You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.
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The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
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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.
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The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?
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You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you.
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I’d sooner be smashed into a mangled pulp by a bus when we cross the street than look forward to a life like yours.
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Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.
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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.
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A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there’s only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.
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If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.
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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.
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There is nothing so terrible as the pursuit of art by those who have no talent.
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Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
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We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.
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There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one’s means of livelihood.
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Failure make people bitter and cruel. Success improves the character of the man.
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Dullness is the first requisite of a good husband.
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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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I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
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The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.
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Now the answer … is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.
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We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.
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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.
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Any society that values wealth above freedom will lose its freedom, and will ultimately lose its wealth as well
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM