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Self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion.
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
Control
Passion
Might
Self
Introvert
Bondage
Surrender
Passionate
Active
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.
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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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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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Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, depreciating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a common room.
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Tolerance is only another name for indifference.
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Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.
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A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.
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It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
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It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.
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No action is in itself good or bad, but only such according to convention.
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No egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul.
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People who ask for your criticism want only praise.
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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.
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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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Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.
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She had no mercy. He looked at her neck and thought how he would like to jab it with the knife he had for his muffin. He knew enough anatomy to make pretty certain of getting the carotid artery. And at the same time he wanted to cover her pale, thin face with kisses.
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It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. - Of Human Bondage
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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.
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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.
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You must not pursue a success, but fly from it.
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