William Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965)
English playwright, novelist, and short story writer; often published as simply W Somerset Maugham.
If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.
Of course it was cause and effect, but in the necessity with which follows the other lay all tragedy of life.
Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
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.
No gray hairs streak my soul, no grandfatherly fondness there! I shake the world with the might of my voice, and walk—handsome, twentytwoyearold.
[Money] is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.
The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.
I have been forced to conclude from this that we know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise…
It was such a lovely day I thought it was a pity to get up.
It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.
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.
You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.
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.
I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
I thought I should be a fool to allow work to interfere with a delight in the passing moment that I might never enjoy again so fully.
I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world.
The tragedy of love is indifference.
I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.