Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMMen seek but one thing in life — their pleasure.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
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.
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 -
Most people are such fools that it is really no great compliment to say that someone is above the average.
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 great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
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 -
It is a nuisance that knowledge can only be acquired by hard work.
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 crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force; and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM