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The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
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
Thing
Always
Expedience
Expediency
Sacrificed
Useful
Principle
Principles
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It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.
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It is unfair to expect a politician to live in private up to the statements he makes in public.
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I like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating.
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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.
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She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her.
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Only mediocre people are at the best all the time.
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Sherry, the civilized drink.
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The humorist has a good eye for the humbug he does not always recognize the saint.
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Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story.
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The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.
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Comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly.
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As the cosmos are in place, so be it with your life.
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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.
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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.
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Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither.
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He found that it was easy to make a heroic gesture, but hard to abide by its results.
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It is bad enough to know the past it would be intolerable to know the future.
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By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.
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Perfect is determined in shortened measures of time, not over long periods of time or lifetimes. It would be unnatural.
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Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.
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