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Quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

English dramatist & novelist (1874 - 1965)

People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

It wasn't until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say 'I don't know'.

It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.

She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

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.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world.

Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.

Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.

It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.

It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late.

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.

Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.

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.

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.

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.

The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.

There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.

It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic.

The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.

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.

He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.

When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.

Love is a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of the species.

We have long passed the Victorian era, when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.

CP Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.

You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

The public doesn't want new music; the main thing it demands of a composer is that he be dead.

At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.

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.

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

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.

There will always be one who loves, and one who lets himself be loved.

People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.

You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches them tolerance.

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.

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

It is funny about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the very best you will very often get it.

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.