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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
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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
Thinking
Sincerity
Like
Iron
Cards
Society
House
Much
Would
Think
Parliament
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.
W. Somerset Maugham
When you're eighteen your emotions are violent, but they're not durable.
W. Somerset Maugham
Throw yourself into the hurly-burly of life. It doesn't matter how many mistakes you make, what unhappiness you have to undergo. It is all your material ... Don't wait for experience to come to you go out after experience. Experience is your material.
W. Somerset Maugham
The audience is a very curious animal. It is shrewd rather than intelligent. Its mental capacity is less than that of its most intellectual members.
W. Somerset Maugham
A woman may be as wicked as she likes, but if she isn't pretty it won't do her much good.
W. Somerset Maugham
It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me.
W. Somerset Maugham
There was once a professor of law who said to his students. When you are fighting a case, if you have facts on your side hammer them into the jury, and if you have the law on your side hammer it into the judge. But if you have neither the facts nor the law, asked one of his listeners? Then hammer the hell into the table, answered the professor.
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
A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?
W. Somerset Maugham
She [Sadie Thompson] gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer. You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!
W. Somerset Maugham
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
W. Somerset Maugham
Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither.
W. Somerset Maugham
Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it's the whole of life. It's an insignificant part.
W. Somerset Maugham
A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else believes.
W. Somerset Maugham
He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
W. Somerset Maugham
Only mediocre people are at the best all the time.
W. Somerset Maugham
For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.
W. Somerset Maugham
Affection is created by habit, community of interests, convenience and the desire of companionship. It is a comfort rather than an exhilaration.
W. Somerset Maugham
We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.
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
