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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b769e90 | Benevolence is often very peremptory. | goodness | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 02b9b0e | Good gracious, she could have remained faithful to him in spirit while she was being unfaithful to him in the flesh. That is a feat of legerdemain that women find it easy to accomplish.' What a odious cynic you are.' | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| c5ebfe8 | Do you know, it seems to me that a great deal of nonsense is talked about the dignity of work. Work is a drug that dull people take to avoid the pangs of unmitigated boredom. It has been adorned with fine phrases, because it is a necessity to most men, and men always gild the pill they're obliged to swallow. Work is a sedative. It keeps people quiet and contented. It makes them good material for their leaders. I think the greatest imposture.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| a4f8a19 | He could as little escape her as the cause can escape the effect. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 3d7372a | When people say they do not care what others thing of them, for the most part they deceive themselves | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| e1ef2f1 | You Europeans know nothing about America. Because we amass large fortunes you think we care for nothing but money. We are nothing for it; the moment we have it we spend it, sometimes well, sometimes ill, but we spend it. Money is nothing to us; it's merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that we've set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set b.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| fe46004 | He was the most inconsiderable creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness. | nothingness insignificance | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 121551c | Passion doesn't count the cost. Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. If he meant what I think, he meant that when passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honour is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan a.. | W Somerset Maugham | ||
| 48a4c4f | I do not know what infinite yearning possesses you, so that you are driven to a perilous, lonely search for some goal where you expect to find a final release from the spirit that torments you. I see you as the eternal pilgrim to some shrine that perhaps does not exist. I do not know to what inscrutable Nirvana you aim. Do you know yourself? Perhaps it is Truth and Freedom that you seek, and for a moment you thought that you might find rele.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| e6c9bc0 | It was difficult to understand that he would not come into the bungalow again and that when he got up in the morning she would not hear him take his bath in the Suchow tub. He was alive and now he was dead. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 2c15059 | 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 meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I've got out of the book all that's any use to me, and I can't get anything more if I read it a dozen times. You see, it seems to me, one's like a closed bud, and most of what one reads and does has no effect at all; but there are certain things that have a peculiar sig.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 0f93799 | I have always been a little disconcerted by the passion women have for behaving beautifully at the deathbed of those they love. Sometimes it seems as if they grudge the longevity which postpones their chance of an effective scene. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 10012a0 | I'm looking for something and I don't quite know what it is. But I know that it's very important for me to know it, and if I did it would make all the difference. Perhaps the nuns know it; when I'm with them I feel that they hold a secret which they will not share with me. I don't know why it came into my head that if I saw this Manchu woman I should have an inkling of what I am looking for. Perhaps she would tell me if she could." "What ma.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 9cffaa3 | the hopes that had been cherished there, the bright visions of the future, the flaming passion of youth; the regrets, the disillusion, the weariness, the resignation; so much had been felt in that room, by so many, the whole gamut of human emotion, that it seemed strangely to have acquired a troubling and enigmatic personality of its own. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 894d22a | Saw everything larger than life size, with the outlines blurred, in a golden mist of sentimentality. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 07bfb1c | His life had seemed horrible when it was measured by its happiness, but now he seemed to gather strength as he realised that it might be measured by something else. Happiness mattered as little as pain. They came in, both of them, as all the other details of his life came in, to the elaboration of the design. He seemed for an instant to stand above the accidents of his existence, and he felt that they could not affect him again as they had .. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 12e7c5b | The day broke gray and dull. The clouds hung heavily, and there was a rawness in the air that suggested snow. A woman servant came into a room in which a child was sleeping and drew the curtains. She glanced mechanically at the house opposite, a stucco house with a portico, and went to the child's bed. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 103d605 | 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? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and t.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 3883269 | It amused him sometimes to consider that his friends, because he had a face which did not express his feelings very vividly and a rather slow way of moving, looked upon him as strong-minded, deliberate and cool. They thought him reasonable and praised his common sense; but he knew that his placid expression was no more than a mask, assumed unconsciously, which acted like the protective colouring of butterflies; and himself was astonished at.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 424e757 | My dear, I don't know that in life it matters so much what you do as what you are. No one can learn by the experience of another because no circumstances are quite the same. If we made rather a hash of things perhaps it was because we were rather trivial people. You can do anything in this world if you're prepared to take the consequences, and the consequences depends on character. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 9b297a5 | When I've seen you go into an empty room I've sometimes wanted to open the door suddenly, but I've been afraid to in case I found nobody there. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 8b3501c | Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| f2f990c | It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it." --W. Somerset Maugham" | Anthony Robbins | ||
| d75ba4f | startled the world many years ago by stating in effect that if the amount of pleasure obtained from each be equal there is nothing to choose between poetry and push-pin. Since few people now know what push-pin is, I may explain that it is a child's game in which one player tries to push his pin across that of another player, and if he succeeds and then is able by pressing down on the two pins with the ball of his thumb to lift them off the .. | benthem eliot jeremy-bentham ludwig-van-beethoven titian utilitarianism george-eliot pleasure | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 00efe33 | When one reads, and re-reads, , it seems to me that one gets a more convincing, a more definite, impression of the man than from anything one may learn of his life and circumstances; an impression of a man endowed by nature with a great gift blighted by an evil genius, so that, like the agave, no sooner had it put forth its splendid blooming than it withered; a moody, unhappy man tormented by instincts he shrank from with horror; a man con.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| f858bbd | Roy has always sincerely believed what everyone else believed at the moment. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 27e456c | Money is nothing to us; it's merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that we've set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| f23b3ea | Life had no meaning. On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment. Philip rem.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 5ef70ca | The silence was enchanting. Infinite space seemed to enter it, and my spirit, alone with the stars, seemed capable of any adventure. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 14c4322 | The fact was that he had ceased to believe not for this reason or the other, but because he had not the religious temperament. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| d5f60b2 | I saw that Roy was not inclined to be amused. I was not annoyed, for I am quite used to people not being amused at my jokes. I often think that the purest type of the artist is the humorist who laughs alone at his own jests. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| bfa9905 | it was not a curse upon mankind, but the balm which reconciled it to existence. | existence brow daily-bread sweat curse | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| cda6e77 | his experience of life in an office had made him determine never to have anything more to do with one ... | middle-class office-space | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| d1b9c64 | He has explained why it is that ambiguity touches his heart more nearly than the death and marriage style of finish that i prefer. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| be818e4 | After a great many questions I eventually ascertained that he is suffering from some kind of disorder of the mind. Is there anything more sorrowful than a brain whose proper function has been disrupted? | Diane Setterfield | ||
| d559a7f | Her eyes were too full of beauty to leave room for anything so mundane as intelligence. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| a40618b | Las palabras tienen algo especial. En manos expertas, manipuladas con destreza, nos convierten en sus prisioneros. Se enredan en nuestros brazos como tela de arana y en cuanto estamos tan embelesados que no podemos movernos, nos perforan la piel, se infiltran en la sangre, adormecen el pensamiento. Y ya dentro de nosotros ejercen su magia. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| dc80302 | A curtain was drawn back in every man's inner theater and their storytelling minds got to work. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 0beb634 | How many times have I gone back to the border of memory and peered into the darkness beyond? But it is not only memories that hover on the border. There are all sorts of phantasmagoria that inhabit that realm. The nightmares of a lonely child. Fairy tales appropriated by a mind hungry for a story. The fantasies of an imaginative little girl anxious to explain to herself the inexplicable. Whatever story I may have discovered on the frontier .. | memories truth | Diane Setterfield | |
| 5e22798 | Time was of the essence. For at eight o'clock the world came to an end. It was reading time. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| f6b00c5 | His confidences, this mist, had led us unexpectedly onto a peninsula of intimacy, and I found myself on the brink of telling what I had never told anyone before. The words flew ready-formed into my head, organized themselves instantly into sentences, long strings of sentences, bursting with impatience to fly from my tongue. As if they had spent years planning for this moment. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| c01de42 | I was in a kind of no-man's-land, a place between places. The mind plays all sorts of tricks, gets up to all kinds of things while we ourselves are slumbering in a white zone that looks for all the world like inattention to the onlooker. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| d8c4c8c | Silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 3975b09 | on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived. | Diane Setterfield |