Here is a collection of our most favorite collection of Somerset Maugham Quotes
Starting with his best quote:
It is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it.
Second Best Quote:
Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
All his Great quotes and sayings:
You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.
Men seek but one thing in life – their pleasure.
Men’s heart’s in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ.
Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
You know that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.
When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right.
When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
It’s always difficult to make conversation with a drunk, and there’s no denying it, the sober are at a disadvantage with him.
I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world.
It is cruel to discover one’s mediocrity only when it is too late.
It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.
Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.
Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.
The dead look so terribly dead when they’re dead.
Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
Unfortunately sometimes one can’t do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.
There’s always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.
Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother.
Life isn’t long enough for love and art.
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.
An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.
It’s asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic.
Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.
At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
After all, a man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn’t want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.
Of course it was cause and effect, but in the necessity with which follows the other lay all tragedy of life.
Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one’s soul.
Women are often under the impression that men are much more madly in love with them than they really are.
I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
There is only one way to win hearts and that is to make oneself like unto those of whom one would be loved.
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.
It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise
It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.
We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.
Perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull.
People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
~W. Somerset Maugham at his Pragmatic Best
As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue.
Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequence than to have a really affectionate mother.
A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.
One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one’s life with her.
Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.
I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.
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.
If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?
I like manual labor. Whenever I’ve got waterlogged with study, I’ve taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating.
It wasn’t until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say “I don’t know.”
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
When you choose your friends, don’t be short-changed by choosing personality over character.
~ A very wise quote by W. Somerset Maugham
Sentimentality is the only sentiment that rubs you the wrong way.
The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.
When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
There are two good things in life – freedom of thought and freedom of action.
Tolerance is another word for indifference.
We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.
We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
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