W. Somerset Maugham – 37 Quotes

37 Quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

The crown of literature is poetry.

– W. Somerset Maugham

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

– W. Somerset Maugham

If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.

– W. Somerset Maugham

The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.

– W. Somerset Maugham

Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.

– W. Somerset Maugham

There are two good things in life – freedom of thought and freedom of action.

– W. Somerset Maugham

You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.

– W. Somerset Maugham

Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.

– W. Somerset Maugham

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

– W. Somerset Maugham

Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it’s a mistake to make a habit out of it.

– W. Somerset Maugham

In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally.

– W. Somerset Maugham

Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.

– W. Somerset Maugham

Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

– W. Somerset Maugham

If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?

– 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

Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.

– W. Somerset Maugham

When you choose your friends, don’t be short-changed by choosing personality over character.

– W. Somerset Maugham

It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humour.

– W. Somerset Maugham

Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

– 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

Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

– W. Somerset Maugham

Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature and the error is ineradicable.

– 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 man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn’t want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.

– 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

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

We are not the same persons this year as last nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

– W. Somerset Maugham

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you’re cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

– W. Somerset Maugham

It is not true that suffering ennobles the character happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.

– W. Somerset Maugham

The world in general doesn’t know what to make of originality it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.

– W. Somerset Maugham

Beauty is an ecstasy it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.

– W. Somerset Maugham

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

– W. Somerset Maugham

Any nation that thinks more of its ease and comfort than its freedom will soon lose its freedom and the ironical thing about it is that it will lose its ease and comfort too.

– 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.

– W. Somerset Maugham

Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.

– W. Somerset Maugham