Best 558 quotes of W. Somerset Maugham on MyQuotes

A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there's only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.

Advice to first year medical students: In anatomy, it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.

Affection is created by habit, community of interests, convenience and the desire of companionship. It is a comfort rather than an exhilaration.

A good Havana is one of the best pleasures that I know.

A good story is obviously a difficult thing to invent, but its difficulty is a poor reason for despising it.

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.

A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man.

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.

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.

Almost all the people who’ve had the most effect on me I seem to have met by chance, yet looking back it seems as though I couldn’t but have met them.

A man filled with meat turns his back on the dry bones of political doctrine. Fanatical devotion to the ruling party comes more readily from the materially deprived At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.

A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.

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

An art is only great and significant if it is one that all may enjoy. The art of a clique is but a plaything.

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.

And I have the sunset, and the Tuscan wine, and the white teeth of the women in Rome. I am a traveler in Romance.

A novelist must preserve a childlike belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence.

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

Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.

Any society that values wealth above freedom will lose its freedom, and will ultimately lose its wealth as well

Are you sure you can prevent yourself from falling in love one of these days? Such things do happen, you know, even to the most prudent men.' Simon gave him a strange, one might even have thought a hostile, look. I should tear it out of my heart as I'd wrench out of my mouth a rotten tooth.

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

Art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach man humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action.

Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.

Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.

Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, depreciating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a common room.

As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.

A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden.

A state of reverie does not avoid reality, it accedes to reality.

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

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

As we grow older we become more conscious of the complexity, incoherence, and unreasonableness of human beings; this indeed is the only excuse that offers for the middle-aged or elderly writer whose thoughts should more properly be turned to graver matters, occupying himself with the trivial concerns of imaginary people.

A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else believes.

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.

A woman may be as wicked as she likes, but if she isn't pretty it won't do her much good.

A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self indulgence.

A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.

Beauty is also a Gift of God, one of the most rare and precious, and we should be thankful if we are happy enough to possess it and thankful, if we are not, that others possess it for our pleasure.

Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.

Because a man can write great works he is none the less a man.

Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it's the whole of life. It's an insignificant part.

But I am not sure it would contain any short stories. For the short story is a minor art, and it must content itself with moving, exciting and amusing the reader. ...I do not think that there is any (short story) that will give the reader that thrill, that rapture, that fruitful energy which great art can produce.

But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design.

But the only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you; it may have other and much more profound meanings for the critic, but at second-hand they can be of small service to you.

But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment you experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is the weakness in the character of a great man which may make him less admirable but certainly more interesting. Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu.

But what is criticism? Criticism is purely destructive; anyone can destroy, but not everyone can build up.

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

Clearly much that seemed valid seemed so only because he had been taught it from earliest youth.

Comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued; while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly.

Common sense and nature will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult.