W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

Quotes

• He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.

• When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.

• At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.

• It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

• Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

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

• You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches them tolerance.

• 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.

• To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

• It is funny about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the very best you will very often get it.

• When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it.

• It wasn't until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say 'I don't know'.

• Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

• An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

• Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

• Love is a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of the species.

• We have long passed the Victorian era, when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.

• American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.

• You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

• Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.