The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMFailure make people bitter and cruel. Success improves the character of the man.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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There are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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 -
We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Death doesn’t affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn’t concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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 -
We must be very humble. We must see the beauty of quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us. And let us seek the love of simple, ignorant people. Their ignorance is better than all our knowledge.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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.
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 -
As the cosmos are in place, so be it with your life.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM