W. Somerset Maugham Quotes page 3

“Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.”

Source: Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930), p. 184

“It may be that if I lead the life I've planned for myself it may affect others; the effect may be no greater than the ripple caused by a stone thrown in a pond, but one ripple causes another.”

Source: Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930), p. 15

W. Somerset Maugham book The Razor's Edge

The Razor's Edge (1943)

“Men are always the same. Fear makes them cruel.”

“Considering how foolishly people act and how pleasantly they prattle, perhaps it would be better for the world if they talked more and did less.”

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 55, p. 204

“Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.”

"1892", p. 1
A Writer's Notebook (1946)

“I am a little shy of any assumption of moral indignation. There is always in it an element of self-satisfaction which makes it awkward to anyone who has a sense of humour.”

"1896", p. 17
A Writer's Notebook (1946)

“I have not been afraid of excess: excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.”

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 32, p. 116

W. Somerset Maugham book The Summing Up

Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 48

“Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.”

“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.”

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 53

“You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.”

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 51

“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.”

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 23

“He had a bitter pain in his heart, for he knew that she was still a stranger to him and his hungry love was destined ever to remain unsatisfied.”

Strictly Personal, ch. 31 (1941)

“The trouble with our younger authors is that they are all in the sixties.”

"The pool", p. 127
Short Stories, Collected short stories 1

“It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.”

As quoted in "Sayings of the Week" in The Observer (14 October 1951)

“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.”

Source: Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930), p. 14

“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.”

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 54

“My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.”

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 29

“She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer.
"You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!"”

Quoted in Somerset Maugham (1980) by Ted Morgan

“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.”

"Sadie Thompson" in Altogether - Rain (1934)

“Now the world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.”

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 52

“He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.”

Great Novelists and Their Novels (1948)

“Whatever anguish she suffered she concealed. She saw shrewdly that the world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willingly avoids the sight of distress.”

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 116

“Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.”

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 16, p. 61

W. Somerset Maugham book The Summing Up

Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 164

“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.”

“He had doubts about the utility of examination on subjects which had been crammed for the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test occasion]. He wanted common sense.”

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 67

“Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.”

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 10