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It wasn't until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say, 'I don't know.'
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
Humility
Late
Wasn
Easy
Children
Life
Discovered
Humble
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.
W. Somerset Maugham
By the time an actor knows how to act any sort of part he is often too old to act any but a few.
W. Somerset Maugham
No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.
W. Somerset Maugham
The nature of men and women - their essential nature - is so vile and despicable that if you were to portray a person as he really is, no one would believe you.
W. Somerset Maugham
Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.
W. Somerset Maugham
As the cosmos are in place, so be it with your life.
W. Somerset Maugham
Sentimentality is the only sentiment that rubs you the wrong way.
W. Somerset Maugham
Culture is not just an ornament it is the expression of a nation's character, and at the same time it is a powerful instrument to mould character. The end of culture is right living.
W. Somerset Maugham
Perfect is determined in shortened measures of time, not over long periods of time or lifetimes. It would be unnatural.
W. Somerset Maugham
There are two good things in life - freedom of thought and freedom of action.
W. Somerset Maugham
Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
W. Somerset Maugham
No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.
W. Somerset Maugham
I promised myself that if ever I had some money that I would savor a cigar each day after lunch and dinner. This is the only resolution of my youth that I have kept, and the only realized ambition which has not brought disillusion.
W. Somerset Maugham
A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.
W. Somerset Maugham
Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
W. Somerset Maugham
There's nothing the world loves more than a ready-made description which they can hang on to a man, and so save themselves all trouble in future.
W. Somerset Maugham
The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
W. Somerset Maugham
Her tears were partly tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them was gone. She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer.
W. Somerset Maugham
Evil can be condoned only if in the beyond it is compensated by good and god himself needs immortality to vindicate his ways to man.
W. Somerset Maugham