# Of Human Bondage - Author: [William Somerset Maugham](https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-somerset-maugham.md) - Quotes: 26 - Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-somerset-maugham/of-human-bondage ## Quotes > Of course it was cause and effect, but in the necessity with which follows the other lay all tragedy of life. > 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. > There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved. > But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved. > Men seek but one thing in life — their pleasure. > Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner. > 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. > 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. > 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 might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories. > He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it. > It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. > 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. > People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise. > He was always seeking for a meaning in life, and here it seemed to him that a meaning was offered; but it was obscure and vague. He was profoundly troubled. He saw what looked like the truth as by flashes of lightning on a dark, stormy night you might see a mountain range. He seemed to see that a man need not leave his life to chance, but that his will was powerful; he seemed to see that self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion; he seemed to see that the inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich with experience, as the life of one who conquered realms and explored unknown lands. > It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it. > The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore. > 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. > He had doubts about the utility of examination on subjects which had been crammed for the occasion. He wanted common sense. > Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind. > 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. > 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. > You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.