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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
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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
Laughing
Bore
Reading
Trivial
Book
Bores
Right
Assured
Way
Fellow
Make
Reputation
Think
Fellows
Thinking
Laugh
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
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The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.
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But what is criticism? Criticism is purely destructive anyone can destroy, but not everyone can build up.
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The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.
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I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?
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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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The Riviera isn't only a sunny place for shady people.
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There's nothing the world loves more than a ready-made description which they can hang on to a man, and so save themselves all trouble in future.
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We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.
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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
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There are men who are possessed by an urge so strong to do some particular thing that they can't help themselves, they've got to do it. They're prepared to sacrifice everything to satisfy their yearning.
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The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
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It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
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The well dressed man is he whose clothes you never notice
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Life isn't long enough for love and art.
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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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A novelist must preserve a childlike belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence.
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One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one's soul.
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The tragedy of love is indifference.
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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.
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