W. Somerset Maugham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

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

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.

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.

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

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

At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
W. Somerset Maugham - Of Human Bondage
There will always be one who loves, and one who lets himself be loved.

Love is a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of the species.
W. Somerset Maugham - "Our Betters", 1923
It was such a lovely day I thought it was a pity to get up.

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

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

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

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

People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.
W. Somerset Maugham - The Moon and Sixpence
Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
W. Somerset Maugham - "Of Human Bondage", 1915
People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
W. Somerset Maugham - The Moon and Sixpence
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 - The Moon and Sixpence
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.

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

- W. Somerset Maugham