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I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't.
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
Things
Difficult
Find
Mean
Always
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be as overpopulated as it is now.
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Its a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, few are chosen.
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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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When things are at their worst, I find something always happens.
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A state of reverie does not avoid reality, it accedes to reality.
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People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.
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Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe.
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Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.
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It is not true that suffering ennobles the character happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
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I am afraid of people with too much charm. They devour you. In the end you are made a sacrifice to the exercise of their fascinating gift and their insincerity.
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It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled in them, and each time they come into contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.
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The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery as soon as possible.
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If only the good were a little less heavy-footed
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Make him laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured.
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We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.
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Throw yourself into the hurly-burly of life. It doesn't matter how many mistakes you make, what unhappiness you have to undergo. It is all your material ... Don't wait for experience to come to you go out after experience. Experience is your material.
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Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.
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The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
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Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence.
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The day broke grey and dull. The clouds hung heavily, and there was a rawness in the air that suggested snow. A woman servant came into a room in which a child was sleeping and drew the curtains. She glanced mechanically at the house opposite, a stucco house with a portico, and went to the child's bed.
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