I happen to think we’ve set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection. - William Somerset Maugham

He had talked of getting occupation of this sort so long that he had not the face to refuse outright, but the thought of doing anything filled him with panic. At last he declined the opportunity and breathed freely.

'It would have interfered with my work,' he told Philip.

'What work?' asked Philip brutally.

'My inner life,' he answered.

I don't see the use of reading the same thing over and over again,' said Phillip. 'That's only a laborious form of idleness.'
But are you under the impression that you have so great a mind that you can understand the most profound writer at a first reading?'
I don't want to understand him, I'm not a critic. I'm not interested in him for his sake but for mine.'
Why do you read then?'
Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable if I don't read as if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. 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; I've got out of the book all that's any use to me and I can't get anythning more if I read it a dozen times. ...

The advantage of living abroad is that, coming in contact with the manners and customs of the people among whom you live, you observe them from the outside and see that they have not the necessity which those who practice them believe. You cannot fail to discover that the beliefs which to you are self–evident to the foreigner are absurd.