Quotes W. Somerset Maugham - page 3
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The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action. In France you get freedom of action: you can do what you like and nobody bothers, but you must think like everybody else. In Germany you must do what everybody else does, but you may think as you choose. They're both very good things. I personally prefer freedom of thought. But in England you get neither: you're ground down by convention. You can't think as you like and you can't act as you like. That's because it's a democratic nation. I expect America's worse.
It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.
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I was a stray acquaintance whom he had never seem before and would never see again, a wandered for a moment through his monotonous life, and some starved impulse left him to lay bare his soul. I have in this way learned more about men in a night than I could if I had known them for 10 years. If you are interested in human nature, it is one of the greatest pleasures of travel.
Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious.
She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.
I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious . They are scum.
![[Money] is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.](/fotos/2c/2cb8f89f760e8f5ce2b5a5a591fa3e9a.webp)
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it, so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment.
I travel because I like to move from place to place, I enjoy the sense of freedom it gives me, it pleases me to be rid of ties, responsibilities, duties, I like the unknown; I meet odd people who amuse me for a moment and sometimes suggest a theme for a composition; I am often tired of myself and I have a notion that by travel I can add to my personality and so change myself a little. I do not bring back from the journey quite the same self that I took
He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her.
When a woman loves you she's not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she's weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her.
The worst of having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were acting naturally or being tactful too. [The human element]
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
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But I am not sure it would contain any short stories. For the short story is a minor art, and it must content itself with moving, exciting and amusing the reader. ...I do not think that there is any (short story) that will give the reader that thrill, that rapture, that fruitful energy which great art can produce.
Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more than the opium of an intelligentsia.
