William Somerset Maugham Quotes

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

But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved.

It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.

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.

Of course it was cause and effect, but in the necessity with which follows the other lay all tragedy of life.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Men seek but one thing in life — their pleasure.

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

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

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 ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.