|
d971f72
|
I forgive them because they're human and weak. The longer I live, the more I am overwhelmed by the utter, utter weakness of men; they do try to do their duty, they do their best honestly, they seek straight ways, but they're dreadfully weak. And so I think one ought to be sorry for them and make all possible allowances.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
8b4d3cb
|
they threw this eager vitality of theirs into a vehement striving after the ineffable.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
89e3c29
|
Just as the embryo recapitulates in brief the evolution of the species, so did Suzanne recapitulate all the styles of her lovers.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
49895d4
|
Thank god I'm free from all that now", he thought. And yet even as he said it he was not quit sure whether he spoke sincerely. When he was under the influence of passion he had felt a singualr vigour, and his mind has worked with unwonted force. He was more alive, there was an excitement of sheer being, an eager vehemence of soul, which made life now a little dull."
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
ca46642
|
He realized that he was manacled hand and foot with fetters that were only more intolerable because they consisted of nothing more substantial than the dread of causing pain.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
a791654
|
El arte es la naturaleza vista a traves de una personalidad
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
7afb92b
|
They ascribe omnipotence and omniscience to him and I don't know what else; it seems to me so strange that they never credit him with common-sense or allow him tolerance. If he knew as much about human nature as I do he'd know how weak men are and how little control they have over their passions, he'd know how full of fear they are and how pitiful, he'd know how much goodness there is even in the worst and how much wickedness in the best. I..
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
1053a02
|
Humility is a virtue that is enjoined upon us. So far as the artist is concerned, with good reason; indeed, when he compares what he has done with what he wanted to do, when he compares his disappointing efforts with the great masterpieces of the world, he finds it the easiest of virtues to practice. Unless he is humble he cannot hope to improve. Self-satisfaction is fatal to him. The strange thing is that we are embarrassed by humility in ..
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
8fae50b
|
Like many another member of the gentle sex, she seems to have been ready enough to accept the perquisites of her position, but saw no reason why she should be asked to give anything in return.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
6411a91
|
According to your proclivities, you may take a snow-clad Alpine peak, as it rises to the empyrean in radiant majesty, as symbol of man's aspiration to union with the Infinite; or since, if you like to believe that, a mountain range may be thrown up by some violent convulsion in the earth's depths, you may take it as a symbol of the dark and sinister passions of man that lour to destroy him; or, if you want to be in the fashion, you may take..
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
974070c
|
as we know, Christian charity has always been able to make allowances for a lot of good honest hatred,...
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
e2175e8
|
Is it rash to assume that when a practised writer says a thing, he is more likely to mean what he says than what his commentators think he means?
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
a3cf26c
|
He had passed his life in the pursuit of happiness, and had never learnt that happiness is best attained when it is not sought; and, moreover, is only known when it is lost. It is doubtful whether anyone can say "I am happy"; but only "I was happy". For happiness is not well-being, content, heart's ease, pleasure, enjoyment: all these go to make happiness, but they are not happiness."
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
ea6bb52
|
The particular value attached of virginity is a fabrication of the male, due partly to superstition, partly to masculine vanity, and partly, of course, to a disinclination to father someone else's child. Women, I should say, have ascribed importance to it chiefly because the value men place on it, and also from fear of consequences. I think I am right in saying that a man, to satisfy a need as natural as eating his dinner when he is hungry,..
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
806a876
|
C.-C.: My dear Arnold, we all hope that you have before you a distinguished political career. You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency. ARNOLD: But supposing it doesn't come off? Women are incalculable. C.-C.: Nonsense! Men are romantic. A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self-indulgence. ARNOLD: I n..
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
16a544f
|
C.-C.: Tell me frankly, Kitty, don't you think people make a lot of unnecessary fuss about love? LADY KITTY: It's the most wonderful thing in the world. C.-C.: You're incorrigible. Do you really think it was worth sacrificing so much for? LADY KITTY: My dear Clive, I don't mind telling you that if I had my time over again I should be unfaithful to you, but I should not leave you.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
8aae8b5
|
her very kindness was cruel because it was founded not on love but on reason...
|
|
reason
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
c0754a2
|
Man's desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy within his gates; and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd. It
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
427562a
|
I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
8e20d35
|
Mrs. Strickland was plainly nervous. "Well, tell us your news," she said. "I saw your husband. I'm afraid he's quite made up his mind not to return." I paused a little. "He wants to paint."
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
7b5228b
|
Don't you think he may be pursuing an ideal that is hidden in a cloud of unknowing--like an astronomer looking for a star that only a mathematical calculation tells him exists?
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
151a694
|
And isn't it wonderful that with those simple objects, with his painter's exquisite sensibility, moved by the charity in his heart, that funny, dear old man should have made something so beautiful that it breaks you? It was as though, unconsciously perhaps, hardly knowing what he was doing, he wanted to show you that if you only have enough love, if you only have enough sympathy, out of pain and distress and unkindness, out of all the evil ..
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
698514f
|
It may be that at some far distant day greater insight will show them that they must look for comfort and encouragement in their own souls. I myself think that the need to worship is no more than the survival of an old remembrance of cruel gods that had to be propitiated. I believe that God is within me or nowhere. If that's so, whom or what am I to worship-myself? Men are on different levels of spiritual development, and so the imagination..
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
1613f71
|
I myself stand on one side and the rest of the world on the other. There is an abyss between, that no power can cross, a strange barrier more insuperable than a mountain of fire. Husband and wife know nothing of one another. However ardent their passion, however intimate their union, they are never one; they are scarcely more to one another than strangers.
|
|
husband-and-wife
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
0b20605
|
All sensible people know that vanity is the most devastating, the most universal and the most ineradicable of the passions that afflict the soul of man, and it is only vanity that makes him deny its power. It is more consuming than love. With advancing years, mercifully, you can snap your fingers at the terror and the servitude of love, but age cannot free you from the thraldom of vanity.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
3906cad
|
She was willing to do everything in the world for me except the one thing I wanted: to leave me alone.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
e928066
|
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. I pity with all my heart the artist, whether he wri..
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
cd2072c
|
I didn't sleep that night. I cried. I wasn't frightened for myself; I was indignant; it was the wickedness of it that broke me. The war came to an end and I went home. I'd always been keen on mechanics, and if there was nothing doing in aviation, I'd intended to get into an automobile factory. I'd been wounded and had to take it easy for a while. Then they wanted me to go to work. I couldn't do the sort of work they wanted me to do. It seem..
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
f2e50bc
|
It was a night so beautiful that your soul seemed hardly able to bear the prison of the body. You
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
ee4812d
|
You must know what life is. One can do no good by shutting one's eyes to everything that doesn't square with a shoddy, false ideal.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
9379441
|
Did I not tell you that I, too, in my way was an artist? I realised in myself the same desire as animated him. But whereas his medium was paint, mine has been life.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
8d60993
|
My instinct told me I'd be silly to fall in love with him, you know women are very unfortunate, so often when they fall in love they cease to be lovable, and I made up my mind to be on my guard.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
a864e17
|
From time to time, however, writers have engaged in politics. Its effect on them as writers has been injurious.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
9c3aba3
|
At that bureau a lovesick woman in a crinoline, her hair parted in the middle, may have written a passionate letter to her faithless lover, or a peppery old gentleman in a green frock coat and a stock indited an angry epistle to his extravagant son.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
d52b743
|
The only reasonable thing was to accept the good of men and be patient with their faults. The words of the dying God crossed his memory: Forgive them, for they know not what they do.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
48648cc
|
He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. 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 |
|
2d92bfb
|
one could reconcile oneself to existence only because it was meaningless.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
efa2282
|
Life was not so horrible if it was meaningless, and he faced it with a strange sense of power.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
f5b1722
|
And they had a fairly pleasant time in Pretoria. Eventually, I believe, wars will be quite bloodless; rival armies will perambulate, and whenever one side has got into a good position, the other will surrender wholesale.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
83bb7f5
|
They had furtive eyes and weak chins. There was no wickedness in them, but only pettiness and vulgarity.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
56e14dc
|
His death had been as futile as his life. He died ingloriously, of a stupid disease, failing once more, even at the end, to accomplish anything. It was just the same now as if he had never lived.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
90acfcf
|
The new-born child does not realise that his body is more a part of himself than surrounding objects, and will play with his toes without any feeling that they belong to him more than the rattle by his side; and it is only by degrees, through pain, that he understands the fact of the body. And experiences of the same kind are necessary for the individual to become conscious of himself; but here there is the difference that, although everyon..
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
92678e2
|
It looked as though you did not act in a certain way because you thought in a certain way, but rather that you thought in a certain way because you were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing to do with it. There was no such thing as truth. Each man was his own philosopher (...). " The thing then was to discover what one was and one's system of philosophy would devise itself. It seems to Philip that there were three things to find out: ma..
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |
|
980871b
|
The faculty for myth is innate in the human race. It seizes with avidity upon any incidents, surprising or mysterious, in the career of those who have at all distinguished themselves from their fellows, and invents a legend to which it then attaches a fanatical belief. It is the protest of romance against the commonplace of life.
|
|
|
W. Somerset Maugham |