William Somerset Maugham

Quotes

1. '''In art honesty is not only the best but the only policy.

2. 

   I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.

   p. 336

3. 

   The more intelligent a man is the more capable is he of suffering.

   p. 19

4. 

   Don't you know? Because American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.

5. 

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

6. 

   Things don't get any easier by putting them off.

7. 

   "God? What has God to do with it? Do you suppose I can look at the misery in which the vast majority of the people live in the world and believe in God? Do you suppose I believe in God who let the Bolsheviks kill my poor, simple father? Do you know what I think? I think God has been dead for millions upon millions of years. I think when he took infinity and set in motion the process that has resulted in the universe, he died, and for ages and ages men have sought and worshipped a being who ceased to exist in the act of making existence possible for them."

   He wondered if there was anything in what she said, this woman with her tragic history and miserable life, that God had died when he created the wide world; and was he lying dead on some vast mountain range on a dead star or was he absorbed into the universe he caused to be?

   p. 131

8. 

   It was like one of those comedies where the sets are good and the clothes pretty, where the dialogue is clever and the acting competent, so that you pass an agreeable evening, but a week later cannot remember a thing about it.

   p. 203

9. 

   It was too sweeping a judgement to be satisfactory; the idea dawned in Charley's mind that perhaps men were more complicated than he had imagined, and if you just said that a man was this or that you couldn't get very far.

   p. 164

10. 

    It looked as though the people we thought we knew best carried secrets that they didn't even know themselves. Charley had a sudden inkling that human beings were infinitely mysterious. The fact was that you knew nothing about anybody.

    p. 213

11. 

    "I'm beginning to think it's very hard to know what to believe in this world."

    p. 239

12. 

    Passion is destructive; if it does not destroy, it dies.