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.)
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You can do anything in this world if you are prepares to take the consequences.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Consequences
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
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
The crown of literature is poetry.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Literature, One liners
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
Topics: Age, Aging, Time
If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Nationality, Nationalities, Nation, Nationalism
You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Laughter
Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Family, Mothers
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: Death, Advice, Dying
The world in general doesn’t know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Originality
The love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Love
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
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: Appreciation, Gratitude, Blessings
It wasn’t until quite late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say “I don’t know!”
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Humility
Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Life
The best style is the style you don’t notice.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Writing
Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Hypocrisy
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
I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious . They are scum.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Education, Colleges, Universities
Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Money
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
The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Literature, Philosophy
I’ve always been interested in people, but I’ve never liked them.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: People
American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Americans, Perfection
The passing moment is all we can be sure of; it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Act, Sin
Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Temptation
Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Nature
When you choose your friends, don’t be short-changed by choosing personality over character.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Character
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: Books, Literature, Reading
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
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