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The normal is what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to find them all in a single man is hardly to be expected.
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
Find
Expected
Men
Ideals
Picture
Average
Fabricate
Personality
Characteristics
Normal
Hardly
Single
Rarely
Character
Ideal
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.
W. Somerset Maugham
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
It's a funny thing about life if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
W. Somerset Maugham
I do not think you want too much sincerity in society. It would be like an iron girder in a house of cards.
W. Somerset Maugham
Clearly much that seemed valid seemed so only because he had been taught it from earliest youth.
W. Somerset Maugham
No woman is worth more than a fiver unless you're in love with her. Then she's worth all she costs you.
W. Somerset Maugham
Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
W. Somerset Maugham
Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.
W. Somerset Maugham
I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the center of the world.
W. Somerset Maugham
Perhaps the most important use of money - It saves time. Life is so short, and there's so much to do, one can't afford to waste a minute and just think how much you waste, for instance, in walking from place to place instead of going by bus and in going by bus instead of by taxi.
W. Somerset Maugham
Our natural egoism leads us to judge people by their relations to ourselves. We want them to be certain things to us, and for us that is what they are because the rest of them is no good to us, we ignore it.
W. Somerset Maugham
You cannot write well or much (and I venture the opinion that you cannot write well unless you write much) unless you form a habit.
W. Somerset Maugham
There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.
W. Somerset Maugham
Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.
W. Somerset Maugham
It needs a good deal of philosophy not to be mortified by the thought of persons who have voluntarily abandoned everything that for the most of us makes life worth living and are devoid of envy of what they have missed. I have never made up my mind whether they are fools or wise men.
W. Somerset Maugham
When we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.
W. Somerset Maugham
If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?
W. Somerset Maugham
When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right.
W. Somerset Maugham
People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
W. Somerset Maugham
The tragedy of love is indifference.
W. Somerset Maugham
