William Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) was a British novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. One of the most popular writers in English in the 20th century, he is noted for his clarity of style, cosmopolitan settings, skill in storytelling, and a keen understanding of human nature.
Born in Paris of Irish origin, Maugham was educated at King’s School, Canterbury, and read philosophy and literature at Heidelberg in Germany. He studied medicine, qualified as a surgeon at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. A year’s internship as an obstetrician in the London slums gave him the material for his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897.)
In 1914, Maugham served first with a Red Cross unit in France, then as a secret agent in Geneva, and finally in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg,) attempting to prevent the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. In World War II, he served as a secret agent for the British.
Productive throughout a long life, Maugham is still regarded as having done his great work in four books: Of Human Bondage (1915,) a semi-autobiographical account of a young medical student’s painful progress toward maturity, The Moon and Sixpence (1919,) an account of an unconventional artist, suggested by the life of the French post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin, Cakes and Ale (1930,) the story of a famous novelist, which is thought to contain caricatures of novelists Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole, and The Razor’s Edge (1944,) the story of a young American war veteran’s quest for a satisfying way of life.
During his later years, Maugham primarily wrote essays. The Summing Up (1938) and A Writer’s Notebook (1949) explain Maugham’s philosophy of life as resigned atheism and a certain skepticism about the extent of man’s innate goodness and intelligence. His other works include essays on Goethe, Chekhov, Henry James, and Katherine Mansfield in Points of View (1958.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by W. Somerset Maugham
Now it is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Determination
By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Time Management
The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquility of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Aging, Age
I learnt that men were moved by a savage egoism, that love was only the dirty trick nature played on us to achieve the continuation of the species.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Love
It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Creativity
The Americans who are the most efficient people on earth…have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on a…conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider more important matters of big business and fornication.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: America
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 it values more, it will lose that too
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Nation, Government, Freedom, Laughter
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
Topics: Mistakes
No egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Religion, Christians, Christianity
The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Habits, Habit
For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
To bear failure with courage is the best proof of character that anyone can give… You will find that people forget the failures of others very quickly…. My last piece of advice is not to let anyone see your mortification, but whatever you fancy people are saying about you to go on with your ordinary life as though nothing unpleasant had happened to you.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Failure
A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Politicians, Politics
From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Generations, Aging
You can do anything in this world if you are prepares to take the consequences.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Consequences
Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to popular belief, is more powerful in the mature than the young.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Imagination
You can’t learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Integrity
I’ve always been interested in people, but I’ve never liked them.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: People
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.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Beauty
Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Advice, Dying, Death
I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Effort
The crown of literature is poetry.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: One liners, Literature
I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Reading, Literature, Books
If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Nationality, Nation, Nationalism, Nationalities
Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Common Sense
Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Success, Excellence
I knew I had no lyrical quality, a small vocabulary, little gift of metaphor. The original and striking simile never occurred to me. Poetic flights… were beyond my powers. On the other hand, I had an acute power of observation, and it seemed to me that I could see a great many things that other people missed. I could put down in clear terms what I saw… I knew that I should never write as well as I could wish, but I thought, with pains, that I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Blessings, Appreciation, Gratitude
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Excess, Habits
We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Communication
Common sense and good nature will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Common Sense
We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Love
I knew that suffering did not enoble; it degraded. It made men selfish, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things…it made them less than men; and I wrote ferociously that we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Suffering
Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Temptation
Tolerance is only another name for indifference.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Tolerance
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
Topics: Reading
Has it occurred to you that transmigration is at once an explanation and a justification of the evil of the world ? If the evils we suffer are the result of sins committed in our past lives, we can bear them with resignation and hope that if in this one we strive toward virtue our future lives will be less afflicted.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Sin
It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humor.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Humor
There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Authors & Writing
Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Art for art’s sake makes no more sense than gin for gin’s sake.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Art
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