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Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
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
Temptation
Overcoming
Desire
Often
Best
Way
Satisfy
Overcome
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so, and by the manipulation of his plot, he can engage the reader's attention so that he does not perceive the violence that has been done to him.
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Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more than the opium of an intelligentsia.
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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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Imagination grows by exercise.
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An art is only great and significant if it is one that all may enjoy. The art of a clique is but a plaything.
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I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.
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Tolerance is only another name for indifference.
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The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account.
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There are directors who desire to be artistic. It is pathetic to compare the seriousness of their aim with the absurdity of their attainment.
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What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?
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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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The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
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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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It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest.
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For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.
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You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance, and the humorist, with a smile and perhaps a sigh, is more likely to shrug his shoulders than to condemn.
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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.
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The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel.
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We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.
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Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.
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