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I happen to think we’ve set our ideal on the wrong objects I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.
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
Wrong
Happens
Self
Ideal
Men
Ideals
Think
Perfection
Thinking
Objects
Greatest
Happen
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.
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If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
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If a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him, it's his fault, not hers.
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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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A state of reverie does not avoid reality, it accedes to reality.
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It does the heart good to look at you.
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It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.
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Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.
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Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
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Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can.
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He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her.
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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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D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.
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Now the answer ... is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.
W. Somerset Maugham
Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.
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Women's hearts are like old china, none the worse for a break or two.
W. Somerset Maugham
The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.
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A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.
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The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead.
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I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice.
W. Somerset Maugham
