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There is only one thing about which I am certain, and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain
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
Certain
Littles
Little
Thing
Certainty
Decision
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When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.
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I can only guess that it made the world he went back to...strangely without meaning. Though he lived in it, though he even enjoyed it, it remained utterly remote. I think it had lost sense for him. In his heart was the reflection of a lovely dream that he could never quite recall.
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I [Death] was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.
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Writing is the supreme solace.
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The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willing avoids the sight of distress.
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If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
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The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.
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Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story.
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If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.
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Perfect is determined in shortened measures of time, not over long periods of time or lifetimes. It would be unnatural.
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Only mediocre people are at the best all the time.
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Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
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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.
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Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
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It is a nuisance that knowledge can only be acquired by hard work.
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A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.
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People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.
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The last words he said to me when I bade him good-night were: Tell Amy it's no good coming after me. Anyhow, I shall change my hotel, so she wouldn't be able to find me.' My own impression is that she's well rid of you,' I said. My dear fellow, I only hope you'll be able to make her see it. But women are very unintelligent.
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It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.
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Are you sure you can prevent yourself from falling in love one of these days? Such things do happen, you know, even to the most prudent men.' Simon gave him a strange, one might even have thought a hostile, look. I should tear it out of my heart as I'd wrench out of my mouth a rotten tooth.
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