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There are two good things in life - freedom of thought and freedom of action.
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
Life
Freedom
Action
Two
Thought
Good
Things
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
W. Somerset Maugham
I have always been convinced that if a woman once made up her mind to marry a man, nothing but instant flight could save him.
W. Somerset Maugham
So long as some are strong and some are weak, the weak will be driven to the wall.
W. Somerset Maugham
Because a man can write great works he is none the less a man.
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
It is bad enough to know the past it would be intolerable to know the future.
W. Somerset Maugham
I've met so many people, often the scum of the earth, and found them, you know, quite decent. I am an uncomfortable stranger to moral indignation.
W. Somerset Maugham
Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.
W. Somerset Maugham
Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
W. Somerset Maugham
Almost all the people who’ve had the most effect on me I seem to have met by chance, yet looking back it seems as though I couldn’t but have met them.
W. Somerset Maugham
The drama is make-believe. It does not deal with truth but with effect.
W. Somerset Maugham
Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, depreciating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a common room.
W. Somerset Maugham
I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to the universities go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene ... They are scum.
W. Somerset Maugham
I do not think you want too much sincerity in society. It would be like an iron girder in a house of cards.
W. Somerset Maugham
Have common sense and stick to the point.
W. Somerset Maugham
The great man is too often all of a piece it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you.
W. Somerset Maugham
There was once a professor of law who said to his students. When you are fighting a case, if you have facts on your side hammer them into the jury, and if you have the law on your side hammer it into the judge. But if you have neither the facts nor the law, asked one of his listeners? Then hammer the hell into the table, answered the professor.
W. Somerset Maugham
There is no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to be able to tell you what mutton tastes like. It is enough if he eats a cutlet. But he should do that.
W. Somerset Maugham
Most people are such fools that it is really no great compliment to say that someone is above the average.
W. Somerset Maugham
I like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating.
W. Somerset Maugham
