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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| d249be9 | For the same uprush of fancy which had shown him with all the force of mathematical demonstration that life had no meaning, brought with it another idea; and that was why Cronshaw, he imagined, had given him the Persian rug. As the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the pleasure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life, or if one was forced to believe that his actions were outside his choosing, so might a man look at h.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 4e6905b | Aloof on her mountain top she considered the innumerable activities of men. She had a wonderful sense of freedom from all earthly ties, and it was such an ecstasy that nothing in comparison with it had any value. She felt like a spirit in heaven. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 400f9f8 | going about with a huge, heavy arm or dragging along a grossly disfigured leg. Men and women wore the lava-lava. "It's a very indecent costume," said Mrs. Davidson. "Mr. Davidson thinks it should be prohibited by law. How can you expect people to be moral when they wear nothing but a strip of red cotton round their loins?" "It's suitable enough to the climate," said the doctor, wiping the sweat off his head. Now that they were on land the h.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 76ee1e6 | I wish to deal only with the masterpieces which the consensus of opinion for a long time has accepted as supreme. We are all supposed to have read them; it is a pity that so few of us have. | reading | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 7533981 | We paint from within outward - if we force our vision on the world it calls us great painters; if we don't it ignores us; but we are the same. We don't attach any meaning to greatness or smallness. What happens to our work afterward is unimportant; we have got all we could out of it while we were doing it. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 38f27bc | The best to be said for it is that when you've come to the conclusion that something is inevitable all you can do is to make the best of it. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| f45bfef | Thoreau] is a nimble skater who cuts elegant and complicated figures on a surface of frozen platitudes. Perhaps he would have been a better writer if he had not been quite so good a man. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 23cbdb0 | He was no longer the awkward man of social intercourse, who was sufficiently conscious of his limitations not to talk of what he did not understand, and sincere enough not to express admiration for what he did not like. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 7f8931b | She had asked if he was good-looking. 'No, I don't think he is,' answered Margaret, 'but he's very paintable.' 'That is an answer which has the advantage of sounding well and meaning nothing,' smiled Susie. She | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| ba7c161 | I do not attach any exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life is there to be lived rather than to be written about. My aim is to search out the manifold experience that it offers, wringing from each moment what of emotion it presents. I look upon my writing as a graceful accomplishment which does not absorb but rather adds pleasure to existence. And as for posterity--damn posterity. | poem posterity | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| 2d5bd68 | The Almighty can hardly be such a fool as the churches make out. If you keep His laws I don't think He can care a packet of pins whether you believe in Him or not. | spirituality religion | W. Somerset Maugham |