Love is what happens to men and women who don’t know each other.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMWe do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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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From the earliest time the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.
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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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What does democracy come down to? The persuasive power of slogans invented by wily self-seeking politicians.
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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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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.
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The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?
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If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?
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It is bad enough to know the past; it would be intolerable to know the future.
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As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.
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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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To 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.
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The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.
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As the cosmos are in place, so be it with your life.
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He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
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The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.
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Don’t wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material.
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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.
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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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The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
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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.
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She loved three things – a joke, a glass of wine, and a handsome man.
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Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.
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All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
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Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
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The essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM