Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it’s a mistake to make a habit out of it.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Marriage
Impropriety is the soul of wit.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Wit, One liners
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
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: Aging, Generations
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: Age, Aging
It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers
The audience is not the least important actor in the play, and if it will not do its allotted share the play falls to pieces.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Acting
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Habits, Excess
Common sense and good nature will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Common Sense
Tolerance is only another name for indifference.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Tolerance
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
Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.
—W. Somerset Maugham
We know our friends by their defects rather than their merits.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Friends, Friendship
Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Temptation
When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Age, Aging
The best style is the style you don’t notice.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Writing
At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Party
Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Excellence, Success
I’ve met so many people, often the scum of the earth, and found them, you know, quite decent. I am an uncomfortable stranger to moral indignation.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: People
Lady Hodmarsh and the duchess immediately assumed the clinging affability that persons of rank assume with their inferiors in order to show them that they are not in the least conscious of any difference in station between them.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Class
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Authors & Writing, Art, Writers
The life force is vigorous. The delight that accompanies it counter-balances all the pains and hardships that confront men.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Life
Sincerity in society is like an iron girder in a house of cards.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Sincerity
Death doesn’t affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn’t concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Dying, Death
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
In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Night
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
Genius is talent provided with ideals.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Talent
Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives by make-believe.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Vanity, Truth
I don’t think you want too much sincerity in society. It would be like an iron girder in a house of cards.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Topics: Manners
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Graham Greene British Novelist
- Dodie Smith American Author
- J. B. Priestley British Novelist, Playwright, Essayist
- Andre Gide French Novelist
- Marquis de Sade French Writer
- Christopher Marlowe English Playwright
- Jean-Paul Sartre French Philosopher
- Dorothy L. Sayers English Novelist, Playwright
- Virginia Woolf English Novelist
- Simone de Beauvoir French Philosopher
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