Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
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
Guides
Diversity
Tradition
Internet
Teaching
Jailer
Conformity
Guide
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
She was a fool and he knew it and because he loved her it had made no difference.
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 are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. Somerset Maugham
You're beginning to dislike me, aren't you? Well, dislike me. It doesn't make any difference to me now.
W. Somerset Maugham
The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
W. Somerset Maugham
The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.
W. Somerset Maugham
As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue.
W. Somerset Maugham
He found that it was easy to make a heroic gesture, but hard to abide by its results.
W. Somerset Maugham
Imagination grows by exercise.
W. Somerset Maugham
She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious.
W. Somerset Maugham
In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honesty is not only the best but the only policy.
W. Somerset Maugham
Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more than the opium of an intelligentsia.
W. Somerset Maugham
The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so, and by the manipulation of his plot, he can engage the reader's attention so that he does not perceive the violence that has been done to him.
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
I don't know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God.
W. Somerset Maugham
The good traveler has the gift of surprise.
W. Somerset Maugham
Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.
W. Somerset Maugham
Love is not always blind and there are few things that cause greater wretchedness than to love with all your heart someone who you know is unworthy of love.
W. Somerset Maugham
Conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.
W. Somerset Maugham
Oh, it's always the same,' she sighed, 'if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.
W. Somerset Maugham
