Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMImpropriety is the soul of wit.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
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He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
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Oh, it’s always the same,’ she sighed, ‘if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.
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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.
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It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.
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There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one’s means of livelihood.
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I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
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The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity.
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The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
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I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.
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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.
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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.
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When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
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The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?
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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?
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Failure make people bitter and cruel. Success improves the character of the man.
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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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Any society that values wealth above freedom will lose its freedom, and will ultimately lose its wealth as well
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Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.
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It is a nuisance that knowledge can only be acquired by hard work.
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I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.
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Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
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Death doesn’t affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn’t concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.
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The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
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One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one’s life with her.
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What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one’s faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one’s memories.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM