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Culture is not just an ornament it is the expression of a nation's character, and at the same time it is a powerful instrument to mould character. The end of culture is right living.
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
Powerful
Mould
Living
Ornaments
Culture
Accountability
Ends
Instrument
Character
Instruments
Right
Nation
Time
Expression
Life
Nations
Ornament
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
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
Beauty is an ecstasy it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.
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People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
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.
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If a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him, it's his fault, not hers.
W. Somerset Maugham
Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
W. Somerset Maugham
The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.
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
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.
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There are many foolish people in the world and when a man in a rather high position puts on no frills, slaps them on the back, and tells them he'll do anything in the world for them, they are very likely to think him clever.
W. Somerset Maugham
The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.
W. Somerset Maugham
When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch's statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
W. Somerset Maugham
Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe.
W. Somerset Maugham
It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. - Of Human Bondage
W. Somerset Maugham
There is no cruelty greater than a woman's to a man who loves her and whom she does not love she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an insane irritation.
W. Somerset Maugham
Thank God, I can look at a sunset now without having to think how to describe it
W. Somerset Maugham
Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can.
W. Somerset Maugham
One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her.
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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