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In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honesty is not only the best but the only policy.
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
Succeed
Policy
Practice
Business
Art
Best
Succeeds
Sometimes
Sharp
Honesty
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
The first duty of a woman is to be pretty, the second is to be well-groomed, and the third is never to contradict.
W. Somerset Maugham
When we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.
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Great writers create writers of smaller gifts copy
W. Somerset Maugham
Make him laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured.
W. Somerset Maugham
I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?
W. Somerset Maugham
It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is.
W. Somerset Maugham
There are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity. I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?
W. Somerset Maugham
There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth of the valley.
W. Somerset Maugham
Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it.
W. Somerset Maugham
I wonder how anyone can have the face to condemn others when he reflects upon his own thoughts.
W. Somerset Maugham
We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house.
W. Somerset Maugham
It needs a good deal of philosophy not to be mortified by the thought of persons who have voluntarily abandoned everything that for the most of us makes life worth living and are devoid of envy of what they have missed. I have never made up my mind whether they are fools or wise men.
W. Somerset Maugham
Nothing more predisposes someone in our favour than to let him rob you a little.
W. Somerset Maugham
It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me.
W. Somerset Maugham
Look after your laundry, and your soul will look after itself.
W. Somerset Maugham
In heaven, when the blessed use the telephone they will say what they have to say and not a word besides.
W. Somerset Maugham
I thought it was only in revealed religion that a mistranslation improved the sense.
W. Somerset Maugham
It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late. It does not improve the temper.
W. Somerset Maugham
But the only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you it may have other and much more profound meanings for the critic, but at second-hand they can be of small service to you.
W. Somerset Maugham
When you're eighteen your emotions are violent, but they're not durable.
W. Somerset Maugham
