William Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965)
English playwright, novelist, and short story writer; often published as simply W Somerset Maugham.
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.
People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.
Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.
At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.
The sad Don Quixote of a worthless purpose.
Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
Things don't get any easier by putting them off.
She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she out into her answer.
"You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!"
Women are always glad to listen when you discourse upon love...
Both these men are in love with Natasha, Count Rostov's younger daughter, and in her Tolstoy has created the most delightful girl in fiction. Nothing is so difficult as to portray a young girl who is at once charming and interesting. Generally the young girls of fiction are colorless (Amelia in Vanity Fair), priggish (Fanny in Mansfield Park), too clever by half (Constantia Durham in The Egoist), or little geese (Dora in David Copperfield), silly flirts or innocent beyound belief. It is understandable that they should be an awkward subject for the novelist to deal with, for at that tender age the personality is undeveloped. Similarly a painter can only make a face interesting when the vicissitudes of life, thought, love and suffering have given it character. In the portrait of a girl the best he can do is to represent the charm and beauty of youth. But Natasha is entirely natural. She is sweet, sensitive, and sympathetic, willful, childish, womanly already, idealistic, quick-tempered, warm-hearted, headstrong, capricious and in everything enchanting. Tolstoy created many women and they are wonderfully true to life, but never another who wins the affection of the reader as does Natasha.
The trouble with our younger authors is that they are all in the sixties.
Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.
The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.
He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
Now it is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it…
Almost all the people who have had most effect on me I seem to have met by chance.
I do not believe they are right who say that the defects of famous men should be ignored. I think it is better that we should know them. Then, though we are conscious of having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe that that is no hindrance to our achieving also something of their virtues.