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When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.
W. Somerset Maugham
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W. Somerset Maugham
Age: 90 †
Born: 1874
Born: January 1
Died: 1965
Died: January 1
Army Scout
Literary Critic
Novelist
Physician Writer
Playwright
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Paris
France
W. Somerset Maugham
Somerset Maugham
Personality
Short
Choose
Changed
Friends
Inspirational
Choosing
Character
Children
Friendship
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.
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A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.
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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 practiced at spare moments it is a whole-time job.
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Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.
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I don't think that women ought to sit down at table with men. It ruins conversation and I'm sure it's very bad for them. It puts ideas in their heads, and women are never at ease with themselves when they have ideas.
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We Americans... like change. It is at once our weakness and our strength.
W. Somerset Maugham
Conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.
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The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account.
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If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.
W. Somerset Maugham
The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead.
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Dying is the most hellishly boresome experience in the world! Particularly when it entails dying of 'natural causes'.
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Nothing more predisposes someone in our favour than to let him rob you a little.
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Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.
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The last words he said to me when I bade him good-night were: Tell Amy it's no good coming after me. Anyhow, I shall change my hotel, so she wouldn't be able to find me.' My own impression is that she's well rid of you,' I said. My dear fellow, I only hope you'll be able to make her see it. But women are very unintelligent.
W. Somerset Maugham
Yet magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.
W. Somerset Maugham
Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.
W. Somerset Maugham
There are directors who desire to be artistic. It is pathetic to compare the seriousness of their aim with the absurdity of their attainment.
W. Somerset Maugham
The essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity.
W. Somerset Maugham
It was like making a blunder at a party there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it.
W. Somerset Maugham
I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.
W. Somerset Maugham
