Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMA dictator must fool all the people all the time and there’s only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.
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The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
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All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
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Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
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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 …
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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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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.
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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.
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The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
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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.
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It was such a beautiful day I decided to stay in bed.
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if you’d ever had a grown-up daughter you’d know that by comparison a bucking steer is easy to manage. And as to knowing what goes on inside her – well, it’s much better to pretend you’re the simple, innocent old fool she almost certainly takes you for.
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The world is hard and cruel. We are here none knows why, and we go none knows whither.
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If a man hasn’t what’s necessary to make a woman love him, it’s his fault, not hers.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM