It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. - W. Somerset Maugham
Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life. - W. Somerset Maugham
The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth. - W. Somerset Maugham
Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. - W. Somerset Maugham
It is funny about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the very best you will very often get it. - W. Somerset Maugham
What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them? - W. Somerset Maugham
It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. - W. Somerset Maugham
An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones. - W. Somerset Maugham
I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present. - W. Somerset Maugham
The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead. - W. Somerset Maugham
D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children. - W. Somerset Maugham
People ask for criticism, but they only want praise. - W. Somerset Maugham
I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy? - W. Somerset Maugham
we do not write as we want but as we can - W. Somerset Maugham
I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world. - W. Somerset Maugham
One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one's soul. - W. Somerset Maugham
The average American can get into the kingdom of heaven much more easily than he can get into the Boulevard St. Germain. - W. Somerset Maugham
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people cruel and bitter. - W. Somerset Maugham
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
American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers. - W. Somerset Maugham
A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life. - W. Somerset Maugham
Did you really cease to love a person because you had been treated cruelly? - W. Somerset Maugham
It`s only the boring who are bored. - W. Somerset Maugham
It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up. - W. Somerset Maugham
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer. - W. Somerset Maugham
Mrs. MacAndrew shared the common opinion of her sex that a man is always a brute to leave a woman who is attached to him, but that a woman is much to blame if he does. - W. Somerset Maugham
The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency. - W. Somerset Maugham
No egoism is so insufferable as the Christian with regard to his soul. - W. Somerset Maugham
If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news? - W. Somerset Maugham
Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young. - W. Somerset Maugham
A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words? - W. Somerset Maugham
When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully. - W. Somerset Maugham
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind. - W. Somerset Maugham
Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers. - W. Somerset Maugham
We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us. - W. Somerset Maugham
There are few things so pleasant as a picnic eaten in perfect comfort. - W. Somerset Maugham
I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp. - 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
Love is a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of the species. - W. Somerset Maugham
Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem. - W. Somerset Maugham
Perhaps the most important use of money - It saves time. Life is so short, and there's so much to do, one can't afford to waste a minute; and just think how much you waste, for instance, in walking from place to place instead of going by bus and in going by bus instead of by taxi. - W. Somerset Maugham
It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late. - W. Somerset Maugham
The important thing was to love rather than to be loved. - W. Somerset Maugham
There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror. - W. Somerset Maugham
Tao. Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither. - W. Somerset Maugham
To write simply is as difficult as to be good. - W. Somerset Maugham
...some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. - W. Somerset Maugham
Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty; the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding. - W. Somerset Maugham
An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do. - W. Somerset Maugham
There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed. - W. Somerset Maugham
If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech. - W. Somerset Maugham
One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her. - W. Somerset Maugham
Charm and nothing but charm at last grows a little tiresome. It's a relief then to deal with a man who isn't quite so delightful but a little more sincere. - W. Somerset Maugham
As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue. - W. Somerset Maugham
The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love. - W. Somerset Maugham
The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit. - W. Somerset Maugham
There will always be one who loves, and one who lets himself be loved. - W. Somerset Maugham
My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror. - W. Somerset Maugham
The path to Salvation is as narrow and as difficult to walk as a razor's edge. - W. Somerset Maugham
Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. - W. Somerset Maugham
A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man. - W. Somerset Maugham
It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. - W. Somerset Maugham
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. - W. Somerset Maugham
To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day. - W. Somerset Maugham
The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes. - W. Somerset Maugham
Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure. - W. Somerset Maugham
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. - W. Somerset Maugham
It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest. - W. Somerset Maugham
Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it. - W. Somerset Maugham
Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner. - W. Somerset Maugham
You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency. - W. Somerset Maugham
Life isn't long enough for love and art. - W. Somerset Maugham
I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't. - W. Somerset Maugham
You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers. You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you. - W. Somerset Maugham
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. - W. Somerset Maugham
You can never know enough about your characters - W. Somerset Maugham
I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice. - W. Somerset Maugham
It's always difficult to make conversation with a drunk, and there's no denying it, the sober are at a disadvantage with him. - W. Somerset Maugham
It is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. - W. Somerset Maugham
She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit. - W. Somerset Maugham
When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character. - W. Somerset Maugham
I've been quite happy. Look, here are my proofs. Remember that I am indifferent to discomforts which would harass other folk. What do the circumstances of life matter if your dreams make you lord paramount of time and space? - W. Somerset Maugham
A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience. - W. Somerset Maugham
When things are at their worst I find something always happens. - W. Somerset Maugham
You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches them tolerance. - W. Somerset Maugham
It wasn't until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say 'I don't know'. - W. Somerset Maugham
There is only one way to win hearts and that is to make oneself like unto those of whom one would be loved. - W. Somerset Maugham
Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy. - W. Somerset Maugham
Milk is very nice, especially with a drop of brandy in it, but the domestic cow is only too glad to be rid of it. A swollen udder is very uncomfortable - W. Somerset Maugham
Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it’s a mistake to make a habit of it. - W. Somerset Maugham
When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me. - W. Somerset Maugham
The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore. - 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
To me he seemed one of those persons destined to failure of whom you wonder what purpose it can ever serve that they should have ben born. - W. Somerset Maugham
There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved. - W. Somerset Maugham
The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you. - W. Somerset Maugham
He had not even the self-complacency that enables stupid people to accept their mediocrity with unction; he had on the contrary an engaging modesty. - W. Somerset Maugham
Only a mediocre person is always at his best. - W. Somerset Maugham
Se cree un genio, pero está equivocado. El genio supone una capacidad infinita de trabajo. Lo único que hace falta es trabajar. Si uno se empeña en llegar, llega. - W. Somerset Maugham
We have long passed the Victorian era, when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby. - W. Somerset Maugham
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. - W. Somerset Maugham
When you're eighteen your emotions are violent, but they're not durable. - W. Somerset Maugham
A man ought to work. That's what he's here for. That's how he contributes to the welfare of the community. - W. Somerset Maugham
Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it. - W. Somerset Maugham
Women are often under the impression that men are much more madly in love with them than they really are. - W. Somerset Maugham
I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists. - W. Somerset Maugham
I like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating. - W. Somerset Maugham
At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely. - W. Somerset Maugham
He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her. - W. Somerset Maugham
Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it. - W. Somerset Maugham
A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her...but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account. - W. Somerset Maugham
Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy. - W. Somerset Maugham
It's a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, but few are chosen. - W. Somerset Maugham
We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to. - W. Somerset Maugham
Writing is the supreme solace. - W. Somerset Maugham