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It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.

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
Mind
Eternal
Striving
Something
Unless
Insignificant
Men
Emotion
Sincere
Imagine
Naturally
Though
Absurd
Pain
Strive
Inhabitant
Cannot
Planet
Jest
Must
Planets
Ephemeral

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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?
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We do not write as we want, but as we can.
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The ideas for stories that thronged my brain would not let me rest till I had got rid of them by writing them.
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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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Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which this consists.
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In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.
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Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
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With the superciliousness of extreme youth, I put thirty-five as the utmost limit at which a man might fall in love without making a fool of himself.
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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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Through the history of the world there have always been exploiters and exploited. There always will be ... because the great mass of men are made by nature to be slaves, they are unfit to control themselves, and for their own good need masters.
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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.
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What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.
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The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of thought and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.
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My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.
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What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.
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The spirit is often most free when the body is satiated with pleasure indeed, sometimes the stars shine more brightly seen from the gutter than from the hilltop.
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But what is criticism? Criticism is purely destructive anyone can destroy, but not everyone can build up.
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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.
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Imagination grows by exercise.
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I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.
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