William Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965)
English playwright, novelist, and short story writer; often published as simply W Somerset Maugham.
There are men whose sense of humour is so ill developed that they still bear a grudge against Copernicus because he dethroned them from the central position in the universe. They feel it a personal affront that they can no longer consider themselves the pivot upon which turns the whole of created things.
To eat well in England, you should have a breakfast three times a day.
Art... is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
"You bloody fool, you've killed the wrong man."
A god that can be understood is not a god.
Almost all the people who have had most effect on me I seem to have met by chance.
Now it is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it…
He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
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.
Don't you know? Because American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
The great critic … must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.
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.
The crown of literature is poetry.
…the future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.
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.
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.
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.
The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.
Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.
The trouble with our younger authors is that they are all in the sixties.