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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

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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
Difficult
Unconventional
World
Convention
Deception
Conventions
Independence
Eyes
Eye

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Do you absolutely despise me, Walter? No. He hesitated and his voice was strange. I despise myself.
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The audience is not the least important actor in the play and if it will not do its allotted share the play falls to pieces.
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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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When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.
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The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.
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Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.
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You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance, and the humorist, with a smile and perhaps a sigh, is more likely to shrug his shoulders than to condemn.
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There are two good things in life - freedom of thought and freedom of action.
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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.
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Through the history of the world there have always been exploiters and exploited. There always will be ... because the great mass of men are made by nature to be slaves, they are unfit to control themselves, and for their own good need masters.
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The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
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When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself?
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The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
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Failure make people bitter and cruel. Success improves the character of the man.
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It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humour.
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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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I knew that suffering did not enoble it degraded. It made men selfish, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things...it made them less than men and I wrote ferociously that we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
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There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless.
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Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.
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