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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0ac4522 | Larry smiled a trifle ruefully. "Like Rolla [who is?], I've come too late into a world too old. I should have been born in the Middle Ages when faith was a matter of course; then my way would have been clear to me and I'd have sought to enter the order. I couldn't believe. I wanted to believe, but I couldn't believe in a God who wasn't better than the ordinary decent man. The monks told me that God had created the world for his glorificatio.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| a7adb06 | You think pleasure is only of the senses; the wretched slaves who manufactured your morality despised a satisfaction which they had small means of enjoying. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| b191a4e | Do you know what I think? I think God has been dead for millions upon millions of years. I think when he took infinity and set in motion the process that has resulted in the universe, he died, and for ages and ages men have sought and worshipped a being who ceased to exist in the act of making existence possible for them. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 694d1f1 | I adore good food as I adore all the other pleasant things of life, and because I have that gift I am able to look upon the future with equanimity." "Why?" asked Alec. "Because a love for good food is the only thing that remains with man when he grows old. Love? What is love when you are five and fifty and can no longer hide the disgraceful baldness of your pate. Ambition? What is ambition when you have discovered that honours are to the pu.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 8d10a19 | No pain in love is so hard to bear as that which comes from the impossibility of doing any service from the well-beloved, and no service is so repulsive that love cannot make it delightful and easy. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 6370cf7 | And you dared to go counter to your father's wishes? They should have been a command to you. Give me one reason, only one, why, flinging decency to the winds, you demeaned yourself by becoming a baker.' 'Hunger. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 0f55b92 | The devil is a good actor," smiled Domingo." | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| b2fef4c | I should have known that I wasn't meant for happiness and a life of ease. I have other work to do in the world. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| ce24edc | The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them... 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: that is why the criticism of art, except in so far as it is unconcerned with beauty and therefore with art, is tiresome... Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only the .. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 7922f88 | The crown of literature is poetry. It is the end and aim. It is the sublimest activity od the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 768bbab | I walked with my eyes on the path, but out of the corners of them I saw a man hiding behind an olive tree. He did not move as we approached, but I fell that he was watching us. As soon as we had passed I heard a scamper. Wilson, like a hunted animal, had made for safely. That was the last I ever saw of him. | inspiring moonlight mountain peace | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 75419d9 | I repeat here what you will find in my first chapter, that the only thing that signifies to you in a book is what it means to you, and if your opinion is at variance with that of everyone else in the world it is of no consequence. Your opinion is valid for you. In matters of art people, especially, I think, in America, are apt to accept willingly from professors and critics a tyranny which in matters of government they would rebel against. .. | reading | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 3590c04 | Those words, though heaven only knew how often she had heard them, still gave her her thrill. They braced her like a tonic. Life acquired significance. She was about to step from the world of make-believe into the world of reality. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 693bf7c | Here was food for reflection: Kitty had never heard the Chinese spoken of as anything but decadent, dirty, and unspeakable. It was as though the corner of a curtain were lifted for a moment, and she caught a glimpse of a world rich with a color and significance she had not dreamt of. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 0637fc8 | 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. But there is in my nature a strain of asceticism, and I have subjected my flesh each week to a more severe mortification. I have never failed to read the Literary Supplement of The Times. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 772fb48 | I would sooner read the catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores or Bradshaw's Guide than nothing at all, and indeed I have spent many delightful hours over both these works. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 37053bc | Don't talk to me about the country. The doctor said I was to go there for six weeks last summer. It nearly killed me, I give you my word. The noise of it. All them birds singin' all the time, and the cocks crowin' and the cows mooin'. I couldn't stick it. When you've lived all the years I 'ave in peace and quietness you can't get used to all that racket goin' on all the time. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 005feed | The illusion of free will is so strong in my mind that I can't get away from it, but I believe it is only an illusion. But it is an illusion which is one of the strongest motives of my actions. Before I do anything I feel that I have a choice, and that influences what I do; but afterwards, when the thing is done, I believe it was inevitable from all eternity.' | insightful universe | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 947b09b | 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 | ||
| 4e93a23 | What did it all mean? He thought of his own life, the high hopes with which he had entered upon it, the limitations which his body forced upon him, his friendlessness, and the lack of affection which had surrounded his youth. He did not know that he had ever done anything but what seemed best to do, and what a cropper he had come! Other men, with no more advantages than he, succeeded, and others again, with many more, failed. It seemed pure.. | meaning | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 7c7120b | If I have succeeded at all in giving the complicated impression that Strickland made on me, it will not seem outrageous to say that I felt he was at once too great and too small for love. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| aad602b | How the gods must have chuckled when they added Hope to the evils with which they filled Pandora's box, for they knew very well that this was the cruellest evil of them all, since it is Hope that lures mankind to endure its misery to the end. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 22c1257 | I do not like these painted faces that look all alike; and I think women are foolish to dull their expression and obscure their personality with powder, rouge, and lipstick. | cosmetics personality | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 66f0afd | The disadvantages and dangers of the author's calling are offset by an advantage so great as to make all its difficulties, disappointments, and maybe hardships, unimportant...Nothing befalls him that he cannot transmute into a stanza, a song, or a story, and having done this, be rid of it. The artist is the only free man. | writing | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| ae2aae7 | In the week I promised myself I should naturally read, for to the habitual reader reading is a drug of which he is the slave; deprive him of printed matter and he grows nervous, moody, and restless; then, like the alcoholic bereft of brandy who will drink shellac or methylated spirit, he will make do with the advertisements of a paper five years old; he will make do with a telephone directory. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 7716eea | The only way to live is to forget that you're going to die. Death is unimportant. The fear of it should never influence a single action of the wise man. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 22b1e5b | I began to meditate upon the writer's life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world's indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit to a good grace of its hazards...But he has one compensation, Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has show.. | the-writing-life w-somerset-maugham | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| aa752b4 | Sometimes I've thought of an island lost in a boundless sea, where I could live in some hidden valley, among strange trees, in silence. There I think I could find what I want. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 75ef014 | He thought to himself that there could be no greater torture in the world than at the same time to love and to contemn. | love | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 98b7e21 | The Work of Art. When I watch the audience at a concert or the crowd in the picture gallery I ask myself sometimes what exactly is their reaction towards the work of art. It is plain that often they feel deeply, but I do not see that their feeling has any effect, and if it has no effect its value is slender. Art to them is only a recreation or a refuge. It rests them from the work which they consider the justification of their existence or .. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 0053977 | The artist, painter, poet, or musician, by his decoration, sublime or beautiful, satisfies the aesthetic sense; but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 0fe7585 | We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| e60404e | I found I was able to relieve people not only of pain but of fear. It's strange how many people suffer from it. I don't mean fear of closed spaces and fear of heights, but fear of death and, what's worse, fear of life. Often they're people who seem in the best of health, prosperous, without any worry, and yet they're tortured by it. I've sometimes thought it was the most besetting humour of men, and I asked myself at one time if it was due .. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| b1538ff | Larry has been absorbed, as he wished, into that tumultuous conglomeration of humanity, distracted by so many conflicting interests, so lost in the world's confusion, so wistful of good, so cocksure on the outside, so diffident within, so kind, so hard, so trustful and so cagey, so mean and so generous, which is the people of the United States. | identity national-identity united-states | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| e879586 | the gardener, an old sailor, made him a hammock and fixed it up for him in the branches of a weeping willow. And here for long hours he lay, hidden from anyone who might come to the vicarage, reading, reading passionately. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 2c9aaca | I suppose it had never struck him that, Ischia, which he looked at every evening to see what the weather would be like the next day, or Vesuvius, pearly in the dawn, had anything to do with him at all; but when he ceased to have them before his eyes he realized, in some dim fashion that they were as much part of him as his hands and his feet. | italy | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| c669af1 | An awful lot of hokum is talked about love, you know. An importance is ascribed to it that is entirely at variance with fact. People talk as though it were self-evidently the greatest of human values. Nothing is less self-evident. Until Plato dressed his sentimental sensuality in a captivating literary form the ancient world laid no more stress on it than was sensible; the healthy realism of the Muslims has never looked upon it as anything .. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 4bcf826 | I did not pay much attention, and since it seemed to prolong itself I began to meditate upon the writer's life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world's indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with a good grace to its hazards. He depends upon a fickle public. He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors w.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| e806c93 | Because once you had been through certain things, their presence inside you never really disappeared. | irrevocable julian-barnes ptsd the-only-story | Julian Barnes | |
| 250cad0 | Old love is a row of beach huts in November. | Julian Barnes | ||
| f403a47 | Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline. | words writing | Diane Setterfield | |
| 738d16e | but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 8d1af59 | Why do they spend their time with cows when they are surely the more natural companions to unicorns, griffins and dragons? The answer is that the rook lives as he wishes. When he wants the entertainment of human company he is more likely to seek out the drunken poet or the wild-eyed crone than a damsel with a cornet. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 6d9985a | We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events. | Diane Setterfield |