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The worst of having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were acting naturally or being tactful too. [The human element]
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
People
Knew
Quite
Acting
Tactful
Whether
Tact
Human
Element
Humans
Naturally
Much
Elements
Never
Worst
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony.
W. Somerset Maugham
It was like making a blunder at a party there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it.
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Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.
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Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty the only thing that counts is the love of duty when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding.
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Yet magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.
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There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless.
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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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A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there's only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.
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I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.
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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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Her tears were partly tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them was gone. She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer.
W. Somerset Maugham
I knew that suffering did not enoble it degraded. It made men selfish, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things...it made them less than men and I wrote ferociously that we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
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Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.
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Have common sense and stick to the point.
W. Somerset Maugham
From the earliest time the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.
W. Somerset Maugham
The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.
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It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is.
W. Somerset Maugham
The normal is what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to find them all in a single man is hardly to be expected.
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It is bad enough to know the past it would be intolerable to know the future.
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One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her.
W. Somerset Maugham
