If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMMoney is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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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.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
I’d sooner be smashed into a mangled pulp by a bus when we cross the street than look forward to a life like yours.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
As the cosmos are in place, so be it with your life.
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 -
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 -
It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM -
The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity.
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 -
But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realized that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM