You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMBeauty 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.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.
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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 …
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We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.
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The tragedy of love is not death or separation. How long do you think it would have been before one or other of them ceased to care?
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There are two good things in life – freedom of thought and freedom of action.
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When a woman loves you she’s not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she’s weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.
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Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.
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Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.
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There are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity.
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There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one’s means of livelihood.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM