W. Somerset Maugham
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.Collection: Time
Look after your laundry, and your soul will look after itself.Collection: Motivational
A state of reverie does not avoid reality, it accedes to reality.Collection: Reality
A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.Collection: Mother
First, cut out all the wisdom, then cut out all the adjectives.Collection: Cutting
Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.Collection: Temptation
Man's desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy (conscience) within his gates; and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd.Collection: Crush
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.Collection: Writing
Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.Collection: Thinking
It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved.Collection: Behind The Scenes
Now the answer ... is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.Collection: Men
Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.Collection: People
The essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity.Collection: Love Is
Most people are such fools that it is really no great compliment to say that someone is above the average.Collection: Work
One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her.Collection: Women
He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.Collection: Money
I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan't make the mistakes I've made. When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never had a chance. I'm going to bring up my daughter so that she's free and can stand on her own feet. I´m not going to bring a child into the world, and love her, and bring her up, just so that some man may want to sleep with her so much that he's willing to provide her with board and lodging for the rest of her life.Collection: Girl
A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.Collection: Country
Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.Collection: Country
Imagination grows by exercise.Collection: Exercise
I have always been convinced that if a woman once made up her mind to marry a man, nothing but instant flight could save him.Collection: Sex
There are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity. I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?Collection: Real
How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and you were my whole life. It is not very pleasant to realize that to you it was only an episode.Collection: Break Up
If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.Collection: Race
Failure make people bitter and cruel. Success improves the character of the man.Collection: Failure
A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.Collection: Writing
The tragedy of love is indifference.Collection: Love
It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.Collection: Helping Others
Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.Collection: Simple
Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.Collection: Writing
If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.Collection: Lying
In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do.Collection: Use
if you'd ever had a grown-up daughter you'd know that by comparison a bucking steer is easy to manage. And as to knowing what goes on inside her - well, it's much better to pretend you're the simple, innocent old fool she almost certainly takes you for.Collection: Daughter
If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one.Collection: Wise
Self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion.Collection: Passion
There are men whose sense of humour is so ill developed that they still bear a grudge against Copernicus because he dethroned them from the central position in the universe. They feel it a personal affront that they can no longer consider themselves the pivot upon which turns the whole of created things.Collection: Men
Vaguely, as when you are studying a foreign language and read a page which at first you can make nothing of, till a word or a sentence gives you a clue; and on a sudden suspicion, as it were, of the sense flashes across your troubled wits, vaguely she gained an inkling into the workings of Walter's mind. It was like a dark and ominous landscape seen by a flash of lightning and in a moment hidden again by the night. She shuddered at what she saw.Collection: Dark
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.Collection: Art
You know, when one's in love,' I said, 'and things go all wrong, one's terribly unhappy and one thinks one won't ever get over it. But you'll be astounded to learn what the sea will do.' What do you mean?' she smiled. Well, love isn't a good sailor and it languishes on a sea voyage. You'll be surprised when you have the Atlantic between you and Larry to find how slight the pang is that before you sailed seemed intolerable.Collection: Mean
I can only guess that it made the world he went back to...strangely without meaning. Though he lived in it, though he even enjoyed it, it remained utterly remote. I think it had lost sense for him. In his heart was the reflection of a lovely dream that he could never quite recall.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Thinking
The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead.Collection: Looks
The inclination to digress is human. But the dramatist must avoid it even more strenuously than the saint must avoid sin, for while sin may be venial, digression is mortal.Collection: Saint
There are men who are possessed by an urge so strong to do some particular thing that they can't help themselves, they've got to do it. They're prepared to sacrifice everything to satisfy their yearning.Collection: Strong
I knew that suffering did not enoble; it degraded. It made men selfish, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things...it made them less than men; and I wrote ferociously that we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.Collection: Selfish
I don't know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God.Collection: Religious
Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.Collection: Giving
It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. - Of Human BondageCollection: Asking
Our wise old church...has discovered that if you will act as if you believed belief will be given to you; if you pray with doubt, but pray with sincerity, your doubt will be dispelled; if you will surrender yourself to the beauty of that liturgy the power of which over the human spirit has been proved by the experience of the ages, peace will descend upon you.Collection: Wise