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First, cut out all the wisdom, then cut out all the adjectives.
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
Adjectives
Cutting
Wisdom
Firsts
First
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
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
A good Havana is one of the best pleasures that I know.
W. Somerset Maugham
In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.
W. Somerset Maugham
The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.
W. Somerset Maugham
You've been brought up like a gentleman and a Christian, and I should be false to the trust laid upon me by your dead father and mother if I allowed you to expose yourself to such temptation.' Well, I know I'm not a Christian and I'm beginning to doubt whether I'm a gentleman,' said Philip.
W. Somerset Maugham
I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to the universities go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene ... They are scum.
W. Somerset Maugham
From the earliest time the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.
W. Somerset Maugham
The best style is the style you don't notice.
W. Somerset Maugham
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.
W. Somerset Maugham
If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be as overpopulated as it is now.
W. Somerset Maugham
He knew that all things human are transitory and therefore that it must cease one day or another. He looked forward to that day with eager longing. Love was like a parasite in his heart, nourishing a hateful existence on his life's blood it absorbed his existence so intensely that he could take pleasure in nothing else.
W. Somerset Maugham
The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.
W. Somerset Maugham
The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain, just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes.
W. Somerset Maugham
Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequence than to have a really affectionate mother.
W. Somerset Maugham
An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.
W. Somerset Maugham
I thought it was only in revealed religion that a mistranslation improved the sense.
W. Somerset Maugham
The crown of literature is poetry.
W. Somerset Maugham
She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious.
W. Somerset Maugham
[Money] is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.
W. Somerset Maugham
