Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The value of culture is its effect on character. It avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens that. Its use is for life. Its aim is not beauty but goodness.
W. Somerset Maugham
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Use
Effect
Culture
Goodness
Character
Personality
Nothing
Effects
Life
Value
Ennobles
Unless
Avails
Beauty
Strengthens
Values
Aim
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
Life is really very fantastic, and one has to have a peculiar sense of humour to see the fun of it. [Virtue]
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
I've met so many people, often the scum of the earth, and found them, you know, quite decent. I am an uncomfortable stranger to moral indignation.
W. Somerset Maugham
It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.
W. Somerset Maugham
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
It's always difficult to make conversation with a drunk, and there's no denying it, the sober are at a disadvantage with him.
W. Somerset Maugham
Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom.
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
All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
W. Somerset Maugham
I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
W. Somerset Maugham
As the cosmos are in place, so be it with your life.
W. Somerset Maugham
When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.
W. Somerset Maugham
It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
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
It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humour.
W. Somerset Maugham
When you're eighteen your emotions are violent, but they're not durable.
W. Somerset Maugham
No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.
W. Somerset Maugham
Yet magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.
W. Somerset Maugham
There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.
W. Somerset Maugham
Men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves.
W. Somerset Maugham
