Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMSometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
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When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right.
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Oh, it is dreadfully bitter to look at a woman whom you have loved with all your heart and soul, so that you felt you could not bear to let her out of your sight, and realize that you would not mind if you never saw her again. The tragedy of love is indifference.
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There’s always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.
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If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.
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If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
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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 personally prefer freedom of thought. But in England you get neither: you’re ground down by convention. You can’t think as you like and you can’t act as you like. That’s because it’s a democratic nation. I expect America’s worse.
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If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.
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We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.
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Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.
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The well dressed man is he whose clothes you never notice
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Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it.
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You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.
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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.
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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.
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I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan’t make the mistakes I’ve made.
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Unfortunately sometimes one can’t do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
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I wish I could make you see how much fuller the life I offer you is than anything you have a conception of.
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A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.
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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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I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.
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Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.
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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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM