W. Somerset Maugham
I am afraid of people with too much charm. They devour you. In the end you are made a sacrifice to the exercise of their fascinating gift and their insincerity.Collection: Exercise
It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.Collection: Writing
No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.Collection: Mind
He is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realized that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature.Collection: Character
It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.Collection: Pain
The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account.Collection: Men
The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you.Collection: Greatness
We Americans... like change. It is at once our weakness and our strength.Collection: Weakness
The first duty of a woman is to be pretty, the second is to be well-groomed, and the third is never to contradict.Collection: Women
Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.Collection: Men
I wish I could make you see how much fuller the life I offer you is than anything you have a conception of. I wish I could make you see how exciting the life of the spirit is and how rich in experience. It's illimitable. It's such a happy life. There's only one thing like it, when you're up in a plane by yourself, high, high, and only infinity surrounds you. You're intoxicated by the boundless space.Collection: Happy Life
A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?Collection: God
I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the center of the world.Collection: Acceptance
The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.Collection: Atheism
There is only one way to win hearts and that is to make oneself like unto those of whom one would be loved.Collection: Heart
Some American delusions: 1) That there is no class-consciousness in the country. 2) That American coffee is good. 3) That Americans are business-like. 4) That Americans are highly-sexed and that redheads are more highly sexed than others.Collection: Country
A good story is obviously a difficult thing to invent, but its difficulty is a poor reason for despising it.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Distance
Nothing more predisposes someone in our favour than to let him rob you a little.Collection: Littles
A man ought to work. That's what he's here for. That's how he contributes to the welfare of the community.Collection: Men
We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.Collection: God
There is no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to be able to tell you what mutton tastes like. It is enough if he eats a cutlet. But he should do that.Collection: Sheep
There are directors who desire to be artistic. It is pathetic to compare the seriousness of their aim with the absurdity of their attainment.Collection: Desire
Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom.Collection: Song
The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so.Collection: Done
The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel.Collection: Thinking
The end of culture is right livingCollection: Culture
Has it occurred to you that transmigration is at once an explanation and a justification of the evil of the world? If the evils we suffer are the result of sins committed in our past lives, we can bear them with resignation and hope that if in this one we strive toward virtue out future lives will be less afflicted.Collection: Past
People are always a little disconcerted when you don't recognize them, they are so important to themselves, it is a shock to discover of what small importance they are to others. [The human element]Collection: People
The worst of having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were acting naturally or being tactful too. [The human element]Collection: People
Marco Polo tells the tale of The Old Man in the Mountains and how he recruits new members to his Band of Assassins by means of drugs, beautiful women, lush gardens, and religious promises. The unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.Collection: Beautiful
I did not believe him capable of love. That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness either for himself or for others; there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to protect, an eagerness to do good and to give pleasure--if not unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence.Collection: Believe
She was a fool and he knew it and because he loved her it had made no difference.Collection: Differences
Common sense and nature will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult.Collection: Life
Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copyCollection: Copies
No action is in itself good or bad, but only such according to convention.Collection: Action
I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?Collection: Self
They say a woman always remembers her first lover with affection; but perhaps she does not always remember him.Collection: Doe
It does the heart good to look at you.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Want
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.Collection: Character
A woman may be as wicked as she likes, but if she isn't pretty it won't do her much good.Collection: Women
When some incident has shattered the career you’ve mapped out for yourself, a folly, a crime or a misfortune, you mustn’t think you’re down and out. It may be a stroke of luck, and when you look back years later you may say to yourself that you wouldn’t for anything in the world exchange the new life disaster has forced upon you for the dull, humdrum existence you would have led if circumstances hadn’t intervened.Collection: Thinking
No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.Collection: Writing
I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.Collection: Regret
The secret of play-writing can be given in two maxims: stick to the point, and, whenever you can, cut.Collection: Writing
I never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.Collection: Book
On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it, so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment.Collection: Stars
Culture is not just an ornament; it is the expression of a nation's character, and at the same time it is a powerful instrument to mould character. The end of culture is right living.Collection: Life