Oh, it’s always the same,’ she sighed, ‘if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMYou know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.
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 -
We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.
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 -
Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Throw yourself into the hurly-burly of life. It doesn’t matter how many mistakes you make, what unhappiness you have to undergo. It is all your material …
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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 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 -
What does democracy come down to? The persuasive power of slogans invented by wily self-seeking politicians.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Life isn’t long enough for love and art.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
To bear failure with courage is the best proof of character that anyone can give.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM