It wasn’t until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say, ‘I don’t know.’
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMOh, 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.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
It was such a beautiful day I decided to stay in bed.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Tolerance is only another name for indifference.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one’s life with her.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
When a woman loves you she’s not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she’s weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
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 -
The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.
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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM