W. Somerset Maugham: Trending quotes

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W. Somerset Maugham: 316 quotes19 likes

“What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably… have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.”

W. Somerset Maugham

Newsweek, 23 May, 1960

“Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Summing Up

Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 223

“Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.”

W. Somerset Maugham

Quoted in Somerset Maugham (1980) by Ted Morgan

“The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.”

W. Somerset Maugham book Of Human Bondage

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 106

“The crown of literature is poetry.”

W. Somerset Maugham

Matthew Arnold, Count Leo Tolstoi
Misattributed

“The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.”

W. Somerset Maugham

Source: A Writer's Notebook (1946), p. 13

“By the time I was twenty-four I had constructed a complete system of philosophy. It rested on two principles: The Relativity of Things and The Circumferentiality of Man. I have since discovered that the first was not a very original discovery. It may be that the other was profound, but though I have racked my brains I cannot for the life of me remember what it was.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Summing Up

section 66
The Summing Up (1938)

“…the future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Summing Up

Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 51

“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.”

W. Somerset Maugham

Source: A Writer's Notebook (1946), p. 189

“I reflected, while I chatted with the woman I had been asked to ‘take in’, that civilized man practises a strange ingenuity in wasting on tedious exercises the brief span of his life.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Moon and Sixpence

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 6, p. 22

“It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.”

W. Somerset Maugham book Of Human Bondage

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 68

“It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic.”

W. Somerset Maugham book Of Human Bondage

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 88

“[…] the Eternal turned his attention to the three shades who stood humbly and yet hopefully before him. The quick, with so short a time to live, when they talk of themselves, talk too much; but the dead, with eternity before them, are so verbose that only angels could listen to them with civility.”

W. Somerset Maugham

"The judgement seat", p. 314
Short Stories, Collected short stories 1

“Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.”

W. Somerset Maugham book Of Human Bondage

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 39

“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.”

W. Somerset Maugham

"1941", p. 336
A Writer's Notebook (1946)

“A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden.”

W. Somerset Maugham

Red http://books.google.com/books?id=6ZZgZw5yX8QC&q="a+soul+is+a+troublesome+possession+and+when+man+developed+it+he+lost+the+Garden+of+Eden"&pg=PA413#v=onepage (1921)

“Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother.”

W. Somerset Maugham

"1896", p. 28
A Writer's Notebook (1946)

“Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Summing Up

Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 290

“The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Moon and Sixpence

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 41, p. 140

“Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.”

W. Somerset Maugham

"1922", p. 196
A Writer's Notebook (1946)