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Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
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
Failure
Inspirational
Persons
Mediocre
Best
Mediocrity
Person
Swimming
Always
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Thinking
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More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
Self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion.
W. Somerset Maugham
We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.
W. Somerset Maugham
Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.
W. Somerset Maugham
Imagination grows by exercise.
W. Somerset Maugham
The great critic … must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.
W. Somerset Maugham
A good Havana is one of the best pleasures that I know.
W. Somerset Maugham
The average American can get into the kingdom of heaven much more easily than he can get into the Boulevard St. Germain.
W. Somerset Maugham
There are two good things in life - freedom of thought and freedom of action.
W. Somerset Maugham
If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it.
W. Somerset Maugham
Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed.
W. Somerset Maugham
Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it's the whole of life. It's an insignificant part.
W. Somerset Maugham
There are men whose sense of humour is so ill developed that they still bear a grudge against Copernicus because he dethroned them from the central position in the universe. They feel it a personal affront that they can no longer consider themselves the pivot upon which turns the whole of created things.
W. Somerset Maugham
The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.
W. Somerset Maugham
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
W. Somerset Maugham
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
Perhaps the most important use of money - It saves time. Life is so short, and there's so much to do, one can't afford to waste a minute and just think how much you waste, for instance, in walking from place to place instead of going by bus and in going by bus instead of by taxi.
W. Somerset Maugham
It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.
W. Somerset Maugham
Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
W. Somerset Maugham
I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?
W. Somerset Maugham
The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of thought and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.
W. Somerset Maugham
