To bear failure with courage is the best proof of character that anyone can give.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMNow it is a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. If you utterly decline to make do with what you can get, then somehow or other, you are very likely to get what you want.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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Failure make people bitter and cruel. Success improves the character of the man.
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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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There are two good things in life – freedom of thought and freedom of action.
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Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
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The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
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Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
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Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.
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There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.
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Unfortunately sometimes one can’t do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.
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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 beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
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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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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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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 MAUGHAM -
There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one’s means of livelihood.
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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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The world is hard and cruel. We are here none knows why, and we go none knows whither.
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Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.
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Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
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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.
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Life isn’t long enough for love and art.
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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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Now the answer … is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.
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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 forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one.
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You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM