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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMPeople ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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The Almighty can hardly be such a fool as the churches make out.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
It is bad enough to know the past; it would be intolerable to know the future.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Now 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.
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 -
You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Love is what happens to men and women who don’t know each other.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Most people are such fools that it is really no great compliment to say that someone is above the average.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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 -
Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly?
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
You’re intoxicated by the boundless space.
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 -
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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM