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If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.
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
Despicable
Oneself
Necessary
Lying
Others
Sometimes
Always
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.
W. Somerset Maugham
A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?
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Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.
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You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance, and the humorist, with a smile and perhaps a sigh, is more likely to shrug his shoulders than to condemn.
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He knew that all things human are transitory and therefore that it must cease one day or another. He looked forward to that day with eager longing. Love was like a parasite in his heart, nourishing a hateful existence on his life's blood it absorbed his existence so intensely that he could take pleasure in nothing else.
W. Somerset Maugham
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.
W. Somerset Maugham
Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.
W. Somerset Maugham
There's nothing the world loves more than a ready-made description which they can hang on to a man, and so save themselves all trouble in future.
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A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden.
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No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.
W. Somerset Maugham
All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
W. Somerset Maugham
By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.
W. Somerset Maugham
The artist can within limits make what he likes of his life... It is only the artist, and maybe the criminal, who can make his own.
W. Somerset Maugham
It is a nuisance that knowledge can only be acquired by hard work.
W. Somerset Maugham
I thought it was only in revealed religion that a mistranslation improved the sense.
W. Somerset Maugham
People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
W. Somerset Maugham
Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experience he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours' relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey.
W. Somerset Maugham
I've met so many people, often the scum of the earth, and found them, you know, quite decent. I am an uncomfortable stranger to moral indignation.
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
