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W. Somerset Maugham

173 quotes

“Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), ch. 3
“The tragedy of love is indifference.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer. "You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sadie Thompson" in Altogether - Rain (1934)
“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 (1874–1965) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Strictly Personal, ch. 31 (1941)
“The isn't only a sunny place for shady people.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Strictly Personal, p. 156 (Doubleday, Doran and co., inc., 1941)
“He knew that women appreciated neither irony nor sarcasm, but simple jokes and funny stories. He was amply provided with both.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Then and Now : A Novel (1946), p. 136
“Now 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 (1874–1965) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Great Novelists and Their Novels (1948)
“The trouble with our younger authors is that they are all in the sixties.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Sayings of the Week" in The Observer (14 October 1951)
“It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ten Novels and Their Authors (1954)
“Money is like a sixth sense - and you can't make use of the other five without it.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New York Times Magazine (October 18, 1958)
“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 (1874–1965) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Points of View (1959) Ch. 1
“What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Newsweek (23 May 1960)
“Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Conversations with Willie (1978) by Robin Maugham
“To eat well in England, you should have a breakfast three times a day.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Somerset Maugham (1980) by Ted Morgan
“Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Somerset Maugham (1980) by Ted Morgan
“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 (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Somerset Maugham (1980) by Ted Morgan
“A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Red (1921)
“I hate people who play bridge as though they were at a funeral and knew their feet were getting wet.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Said in 1921. Quoted in The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990), p. 75
“Observing these people I am no longer surprised that there is such a scarcity of domestic servants back home.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Said in an uncharacteristically loud voice after being refused entry to the premier British expatriate club in Singapore in 1960. Quoted in Robert Calder, Willie (1989), p. 361
“He had doubts about the utility of examination on subjects which had been crammed for the occasion. He wanted common sense.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men seek but one thing in life — their pleasure.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood...Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. 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 (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of course it was cause and effect, but in the necessity with which follows the other lay all tragedy of life.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The modern clergyman has acquired in his study of the science which I believe is called exegesis an astonishing facility for explaining things away.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul's good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Impropriety is the soul of wit.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I reflected, while I chatted with the woman I had been asked to ‘take in’, that civilized man practises a strange ingenuity in wasting on tedious exercises the brief span of his life.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I did not then know the besetting sin of woman, the passion to discuss her private affairs with anyone who is willing to listen.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere, how much baseness in the noble, or how much goodness in the reprobate.”
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source