He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMThe mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.
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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What does democracy come down to? The persuasive power of slogans invented by wily self-seeking politicians.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one’s faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one’s memories.
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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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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 -
A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it.
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Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.
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How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and you were my whole life. It is not very pleasant to realize that to you it was only an episode.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
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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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
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The essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity.
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Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly?
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM