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The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
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
Writer
Aside
Steps
Prose
Beauty
Aim
Literature
Achievement
Sublimest
Ends
Step
Delicacy
Human
Activity
Crown
Humans
Poet
Crowns
Mind
Poetry
Passes
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
In religion above all things the only thing of use is an objective truth. The only God that is of use is a being who is personal, supreme and good, and whose existence is as certain as that two and two make four.
W. Somerset Maugham
Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
W. Somerset Maugham
Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experience he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours' relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey.
W. Somerset Maugham
A man filled with meat turns his back on the dry bones of political doctrine. Fanatical devotion to the ruling party comes more readily from the materially deprived At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
W. Somerset Maugham
Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature and the error is ineradicable.
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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A woman may be as wicked as she likes, but if she isn't pretty it won't do her much good.
W. Somerset Maugham
The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.
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I never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.
W. Somerset Maugham
It must be that to govern a nation you need a specific talent and that this may very well exist without general ability.
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There's no one as transparent as the person who thinks he's devilish deep.
W. Somerset Maugham
You will have to learn many tedious things,...which you will forget the moment you have passed your final examination, but in anatomy it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.
W. Somerset Maugham
The secret of play-writing can be given in two maxims: stick to the point, and, whenever you can, cut.
W. Somerset Maugham
It takes two to make a love affair and a mans meat is too often a woman's poison.
W. Somerset Maugham
It is unfair to expect a politician to live in private up to the statements he makes in public.
W. Somerset Maugham
I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?
W. Somerset Maugham
We are not the same persons this year as last nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.
W. Somerset Maugham
The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue.
W. Somerset Maugham
