I did not believe him capable of love. That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness either for himse… - William Somerset Maugham

Everyone had some defect, or body or of mind: he thought of all the people he had known (the whole world was like a sick house and there was no rhyme or reason in it), he saw a long procession, deformed in body, warped in mind, some with illness of the flesh, weak hearts or weak lungs, and some with illness of the spirit, languor of will, or craving for liquor. At that moment he felt a holy compassion for them all. …The words of the dying God crossed his memory: Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere, how much baseness in the noble, or how much goodness in the reprobate.

Bob Forestier had pretended for so many years to be a gentleman that in the end, forgetting that it was all a fake, he had found himself driven to act as in that stupid, conventional brain of his he thought a gentleman must act. No longer knowing the difference between sham and real, he had sacrificed his life to a spurious heroism.