W. Somerset Maugham
Found 36 thoughts of W. Somerset Maugham
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.
W. Somerset Maugham
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 ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.
W. Somerset Maugham
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
We have long passed the Victorian era, when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.
W. Somerset Maugham
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.
W. Somerset Maugham
If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?
W. Somerset Maugham
American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
W. Somerset Maugham
It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.
W. Somerset Maugham
Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.
W. Somerset Maugham
She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.
W. Somerset Maugham
Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
W. Somerset Maugham
