W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

Quotes

• I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers at their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever knows. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.

• My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.

• There will always be one who loves, and one who lets himself be loved.

• I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't.

• If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.

• Women are often under the impression that men are much more madly in love with them than they really are.

• One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her.

• Charm and nothing but charm at last grows a little tiresome. It's a relief then to deal with a man who isn't quite so delightful but a little more sincere.

• One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one's soul.

• As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue.

• Tao. Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither.

• There is only one way to win hearts and that is to make oneself like unto those of whom one would be loved.

• Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty; the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding.

• It is very difficult to know people and I don't think one can ever really know any but one's own countrymen. For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives' tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them.

• I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

• We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.

• You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers. You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you.

• There are few things so pleasant as a picnic eaten in perfect comfort.

• When you're eighteen your emotions are violent, but they're not durable.

• The average American can get into the kingdom of heaven much more easily than he can get into the Boulevard St. Germain.