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Perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull.
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
Perfection
Perfectionism
Defect
Defects
Grave
Graves
Dull
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
if you'd ever had a grown-up daughter you'd know that by comparison a bucking steer is easy to manage. And as to knowing what goes on inside her - well, it's much better to pretend you're the simple, innocent old fool she almost certainly takes you for.
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The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
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We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
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When married people don't get on they can separate, but if they're not married it's impossible. It's a tie that only death can sever.
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
Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
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
First, cut out all the wisdom, then cut out all the adjectives.
W. Somerset Maugham
Yet magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.
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The Riviera isn't only a sunny place for shady people.
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A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?
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You've been brought up like a gentleman and a Christian, and I should be false to the trust laid upon me by your dead father and mother if I allowed you to expose yourself to such temptation.' Well, I know I'm not a Christian and I'm beginning to doubt whether I'm a gentleman,' said Philip.
W. Somerset Maugham
From the earliest time the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.
W. Somerset Maugham
Comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly.
W. Somerset Maugham
Women are often under the impression that men are much more madly in love with them than they really are.
W. Somerset Maugham
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
W. Somerset Maugham
You can never know enough about your characters
W. Somerset Maugham
The essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity.
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
The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.
W. Somerset Maugham
