W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

Quotes

• The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead.

• A man ought to work. That's what he's here for. That's how he contributes to the welfare of the community.

• Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.

• People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are.

• It's a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, but few are chosen.

• A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.

• Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.

• It's always difficult to make conversation with a drunk, and there's no denying it, the sober are at a disadvantage with him.

• All important persons have about them someone in a subordinate position who has their ear. These dependents are very susceptible to slights, and, when they are not treated as they think they should be, will by well-directed shafts, constantly repeated, poison the minds of their patrons against those who have provoked their animosity. It is well to keep in with them.

• We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.

• A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?

• The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.

• I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?

• Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.

• You Europeans know nothing about America. Because we amass large fortunes you think we care for nothing but money. We are nothing for it; the moment we have it we spend it, sometimes well, sometimes ill, but we spend it. Money is nothing to us; it's merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that we've set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.

• I like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating.

• Perhaps the most important use of money - It saves time. Life is so short, and there's so much to do, one can't afford to waste a minute; and just think how much you waste, for instance, in walking from place to place instead of going by bus and in going by bus instead of by taxi.

• An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.

• The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

• The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people cruel and bitter.