W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

Quotes

• It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.

• She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.

• Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

• It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.

• Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

• I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world.

• Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.

• It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.

• It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late.

• 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.

• Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.

• There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed.

• Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present.

• When things are at their worst I find something always happens.

• 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.

• The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.

• There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.

• It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic.

• The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.

• D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.