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Our natural egoism leads us to judge people by their relations to ourselves. We want them to be certain things to us, and for us that is what they are because the rest of them is no good to us, we ignore it.
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
Relation
Judging
Rest
Natural
Egoism
Certain
Relations
Good
Ignore
Things
Leads
People
Judge
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
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Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.
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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.
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Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
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You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.
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A man ought to work. That's what he's here for. That's how he contributes to the welfare of the community.
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There are men whose sense of humour is so ill developed that they still bear a grudge against Copernicus because he dethroned them from the central position in the universe. They feel it a personal affront that they can no longer consider themselves the pivot upon which turns the whole of created things.
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Clearly much that seemed valid seemed so only because he had been taught it from earliest youth.
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D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.
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You see, money to you means freedom to me it means bondage.
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It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise.
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The inclination to digress is human. But the dramatist must avoid it even more strenuously than the saint must avoid sin, for while sin may be venial, digression is mortal.
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Most people are such fools that it is really no great compliment to say that someone is above the average.
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When we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.
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The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.
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We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
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The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
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It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony.
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Oh, it's always the same,' she sighed, 'if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.
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I do not believe they are right who say that the defects of famous men should be ignored. I think it is better that we should know them. Then, though we are conscious of having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe that that is no hindrance to our achieving also something of their virtues.
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