Quotes by William Somerset Maugham

William Somerset Maugham

English writer

Alive from: 1874-1965

Category: Writers (Contemporary)

Quotes 1 till 15 of 93.

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  Love is only the dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.

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  Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother.

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  The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

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  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.

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  A man's height gives him a different outlook on his environment and so changes his character.

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

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  Any nation that thinks more of its ease and comfort than its freedom will soon lose its freedom; and the ironical thing about it is that it will lose its ease and comfort too.

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

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

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

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  Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.

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

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  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.

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  Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.

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