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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
Thinking
Objects
Greatest
Happen
Wrong
Happens
Self
Ideal
Men
Ideals
Think
Perfection
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.
W. Somerset Maugham
Genius is talent provided with ideals. Genius starves while talent wears purple and fine linen. The man of genius of today will infifty years' time be in most cases no more than a man of talent.
W. Somerset Maugham
She’s wonderful. Tell her I’ve never seen such beautiful hands. I wonder what she sees in you.” Waddington, smiling, translated the question. “She says I’m good.” “As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue,” Kitty mocked.
W. Somerset Maugham
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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Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs.
W. Somerset Maugham
Women are often under the impression that men are much more madly in love with them than they really are.
W. Somerset Maugham
Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature and the error is ineradicable.
W. Somerset Maugham
When a man's in love, he at once makes a pedestal of the Ten Commandments and stands on the top of them with his arms akimbo. When a woman's in love she doesn't care two straws for Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not.
W. Somerset Maugham
Sherry, the civilized drink.
W. Somerset Maugham
Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.
W. Somerset Maugham
Almost all the people who’ve had the most effect on me I seem to have met by chance, yet looking back it seems as though I couldn’t but have met them.
W. Somerset Maugham
To write simply is as difficult as to be good.
W. Somerset Maugham
Make him laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured.
W. Somerset Maugham
One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one's soul.
W. Somerset Maugham
You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.
W. Somerset Maugham
Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
A state of reverie does not avoid reality, it accedes to reality.
W. Somerset Maugham
