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 MAUGHAMThe secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
-
-
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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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 …
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
It is a nuisance that knowledge can only be acquired by hard work.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
I wish I could make you see how exciting the life of the spirit is and how rich in experience. It’s illimitable. It’s such a happy life. There’s only one thing like it, when you’re up in a plane by yourself, high, high, and only infinity surrounds you.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there’s only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
It’s no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM