William Somerset Maugham idézet

oldal 3

„Az ember legtöbbször nem azokat a kísértéseket bánja meg, amelyeknek engedett, hanem azokat, amelyeknek ellenállt.”

„Úgy hiszem, egy járvány során éppoly sok ember hal meg félelelmből, mint fertőzés következtében.”

„Kritikát kérnek tőled, de dicséretet szeretnének.”

„A regényírásnak három szabálya van. Sajnos senki sem tudja, mik azok.”

„A pénz a hatodik érzék, amely lehetővé teszi számodra, hogy élvezd a másik ötöt.”

„Igazat bárki tud írni, de csak kevesen tudunk epigrammákat.”

„A szerelem csak egy ócska trükk, amit a természet játszik velünk, hogy fennmaradjon a fajunk.”

„Ha egy házaspár nem jön ki egymással, elválhatnak, de ha nem házasok, akkor ez lehetetlen. Ez egy olyan kötelék, amit csak a halál választhat szét.”

„Furcsa dolog az élet, ha nem vagy hajlandó elfogadni mást csak a legjobbat, akkor nagyon gyakran meg is kapod azt!”

“You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance, and the humorist, with a smile and perhaps a sigh, is more likely to shrug his shoulders than to condemn.”

“…we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.”

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

“The sad Don Quixote of a worthless purpose.”

“You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.”

“But who can fathom the subtleties of the human heart? Certainly not those who expect from it only decorous sentiments and normal emotions.”

“It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.”

“She had a very agreeable smile; it did not light up her face suddenly, but seemed rather to suffuse it by degrees with charm. It hesitated for a moment about her lips and then slowly travelled to those great shining eyes of hers and there softly lingered.”

“Passion doesn't count the cost. … Passion is destructive.”

“He loved her so passionately he wanted her to be one soul and one body with him; and he was conscious that here, with those deep roots attaching her to the native life, she would always keep something from him.”

“I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

“I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul’s good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed.”

“The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel.”

“No gray hairs streak my soul, no grandfatherly fondness there! I shake the world with the might of my voice, and walk—handsome, twentytwoyearold.”

“I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. … They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.”

“I do not believe they are right who say that the defects of famous men should be ignored. I think it is better that we should know them. Then, though we are conscious of having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe that that is no hindrance to our achieving also something of their virtues.”

“The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.”

“It was not till quite late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say: "I don't know."”

“It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.”

“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.”

“Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.”

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

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

“The crown of literature is poetry.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”