W. Somerset Maugham

"The tragedy of love is indifference."

"She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer. "You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!""

"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."

"The isn't only a sunny place for shady people."

"He knew that women appreciated neither irony nor sarcasm, but simple jokes and funny stories. He was amply provided with both."

"Now the world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger."

"The trouble with our younger authors is that they are all in the sixties."

"It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is."

"Money is like a sixth sense - and you can't make use of the other five without it."

"What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories."

"What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature."

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

"To eat well in England, you should have a breakfast three times a day."

"Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets."

"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."

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

"I hate people who play bridge as though they were at a funeral and knew their feet were getting wet."

"Observing these people I am no longer surprised that there is such a scarcity of domestic servants back home."

"He had doubts about the utility of examination on subjects which had been crammed for the occasion. He wanted common sense."

"You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action."

"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 ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded."

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

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

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

"Men seek but one thing in life — their pleasure."

"People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise."

"There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood...Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five."

"You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"Of course it was cause and effect, but in the necessity with which follows the other lay all tragedy of life."

"Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens."

"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."

"It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it."

"But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved."

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

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

"He was always seeking for a meaning in life, and here it seemed to him that a meaning was offered; but it was obscure and vague. He was profoundly troubled. He saw what looked like the truth as by flashes of lightning on a dark, stormy night you might see a mountain range. He seemed to see that a man need not leave his life to chance, but that his will was powerful; he seemed to see that self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion; he seemed to see that the inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich with experience, as the life of one who conquered realms and explored unknown lands."

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

"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."

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

"It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories."

"The modern clergyman has acquired in his study of the science which I believe is called exegesis an astonishing facility for explaining things away."

"I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul's good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed."

"Impropriety is the soul of wit."

"I reflected, while I chatted with the woman I had been asked to ‘take in’, that civilized man practises a strange ingenuity in wasting on tedious exercises the brief span of his life."

"I did not then know the besetting sin of woman, the passion to discuss her private affairs with anyone who is willing to listen."

"Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure."