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 MAUGHAMLife isn’t long enough for love and art.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
I wish I could make you see how exciting the life of the spirit is and how rich in experience. It’s illimitable. It’s such a happy life. There’s only one thing like it, when you’re up in a plane by yourself, high, high, and only infinity surrounds you.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.
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 -
There are two good things in life – freedom of thought and freedom of action.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.
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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
It wasn’t until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say, ‘I don’t know.’
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
It is bad enough to know the past; it would be intolerable to know the future.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM