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W. Somerset Maugham

English writer (born in France) of novels and short stories (1874-1965)

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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.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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We do not write because we want to we write because we have to.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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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

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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The value of money is that with it we can tell any man to go to the devil. It is the sixth sense which enables you to enjoy the other five.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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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.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will Lose its freedom and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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..as the cosmos are in place, so be it with your life...

– W. Somerset Maugham

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A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her...but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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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.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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I don't know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer because it was he, because it was I.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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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.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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Life isn't long enough for love and art.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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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.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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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. It is failure that makes people bitter and cruel.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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The nature of men and women - their essential nature - is so vile and despicable that if you were to portray a person as he really is, no one would believe you.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish to bewail it senseless.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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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.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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To bear failure with courage is the best proof of character that anyone can give.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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Tolerance is another word for indifference.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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We write to-communicat”!

– W. Somerset Maugham

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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.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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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.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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

– W. Somerset Maugham

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You know that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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