William Somerset Maugham

I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

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

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.

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.

One of the falsest of proverbs is that you must lie on the bed that you have made. The experience of life shows that people are constantly doing things which must lead to disaster, and yet by some chance manage to evade the result of their folly.

Conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.

The modern clergyman has acquired in his study of the science which I believe is called exegesis an astonishing facility for explaining things away.