Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMif 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.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
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 prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan’t make the mistakes I’ve made.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The world is hard and cruel. We are here none knows why, and we go none knows whither.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
We must be very humble. We must see the beauty of quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us. And let us seek the love of simple, ignorant people. Their ignorance is better than all our knowledge.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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.
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 -
Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.
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