Tao. Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither.
"William Somerset Maugham" Order of the Companions of Honour/CH was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s.
After losing both his parents by the age of 10, Maugham was raised by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. Not wanting to become a lawyer like other men in his family, Maugham eventually trained and qualified as a medical doctor (physician). The first run of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time.
During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps, before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service, for which he worked in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917. During and after the war, he travelled in India and Southeast Asia; all of these experiences were reflected in later short stories and novels.
If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous playwrights! More W. Somerset Maugham on Wikipedia.Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.
Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty; the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding.
The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.
Perhaps the most important use of money - It saves time. Life is so short, and there's so much to do, one can't afford to waste a minute; and just think how much you waste, for instance, in walking from place to place instead of going by bus and in going by bus instead of by taxi.
People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.
Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.
We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.
The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead.
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.
The average American can get into the kingdom of heaven much more easily than he can get into the Boulevard St. Germain.
There are few things so pleasant as a picnic eaten in perfect comfort.
It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic.
All important persons have about them someone in a subordinate position who has their ear. These dependents are very susceptible to slights, and, when they are not treated as they think they should be, will by well-directed shafts, constantly repeated, poison the minds of their patrons against those who have provoked their animosity. It is well to keep in with them.
I like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating.
I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one's soul.
We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.
It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.
When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.
To write simply is as difficult as to be good.
I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?
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.
A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her...but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.
It's always difficult to make conversation with a drunk, and there's no denying it, the sober are at a disadvantage with him.
People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are.
Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue.
He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.
There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed.
It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late.
It wasn't until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say 'I don't know'.
There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.
It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.
Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.
She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.
Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.
A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?
An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.
If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.
When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.
Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
When you're eighteen your emotions are violent, but they're not durable.
I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.
It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present.
A man ought to work. That's what he's here for. That's how he contributes to the welfare of the community.
Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
Life isn't long enough for love and art.
It is funny about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the very best you will very often get it.
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
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.
The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.
The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't.
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers. You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you.
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
We have long passed the Victorian era, when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.
Women are often under the impression that men are much more madly in love with them than they really are.
Love is a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of the species.
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.
Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.
There is only one way to win hearts and that is to make oneself like unto those of whom one would be loved.
You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches them tolerance.
You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
Charm and nothing but charm at last grows a little tiresome. It's a relief then to deal with a man who isn't quite so delightful but a little more sincere.
American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her.
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.
I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world.
Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
It's a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, but few are chosen.
There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.
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