Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.
W. Somerset Maugham
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Age
Happy
Lost
Time
Bondage
Illusion
Youth
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
Some American delusions: 1) That there is no class-consciousness in the country. 2) That American coffee is good. 3) That Americans are business-like. 4) That Americans are highly-sexed and that redheads are more highly sexed than others.
W. Somerset Maugham
As we grow older we become more conscious of the complexity, incoherence, and unreasonableness of human beings this indeed is the only excuse that offers for the middle-aged or elderly writer whose thoughts should more properly be turned to graver matters, occupying himself with the trivial concerns of imaginary people.
W. Somerset Maugham
Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.
W. Somerset Maugham
An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.
W. Somerset Maugham
I thought it was only in revealed religion that a mistranslation improved the sense.
W. Somerset Maugham
Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
W. Somerset Maugham
The day broke grey and dull. The clouds hung heavily, and there was a rawness in the air that suggested snow. A woman servant came into a room in which a child was sleeping and drew the curtains. She glanced mechanically at the house opposite, a stucco house with a portico, and went to the child's bed.
W. Somerset Maugham
There is no object to life. To nature nothing matters but the continuation of the species.
W. Somerset Maugham
The normal is what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to find them all in a single man is hardly to be expected.
W. Somerset Maugham
I knew that suffering did not enoble it degraded. It made men selfish, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things...it made them less than men and I wrote ferociously that we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
W. Somerset Maugham
It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.
W. Somerset Maugham
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
The passing moment is all we can be sure of it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it.
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
The audience is not the least important actor in the play and if it will not do its allotted share the play falls to pieces.
W. Somerset Maugham
The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.
W. Somerset Maugham
If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be as overpopulated as it is now.
W. Somerset Maugham
Has it occurred to you that transmigration is at once an explanation and a justification of the evil of the world? If the evils we suffer are the result of sins committed in our past lives, we can bear them with resignation and hope that if in this one we strive toward virtue out future lives will be less afflicted.
W. Somerset Maugham
You will have to learn many tedious things,...which you will forget the moment you have passed your final examination, but in anatomy it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.
W. Somerset Maugham
The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.
W. Somerset Maugham
