Quote

There is no more merit in being able to attach a correct description to a picture than in being able to find out what is wrong with a stalled motorcar. In each case it is special knowledge.

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
Find
Merit
Picture
Case
Cases
Motorcar
Special
Stalled
Knowledge
Attach
Wrong
Description
Able
Correct

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Genius is talent provided with ideals.
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The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willing avoids the sight of distress.
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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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I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice.
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You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers. You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you.
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There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth of the valley.
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One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her.
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Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which this consists.
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Beauty is also a Gift of God, one of the most rare and precious, and we should be thankful if we are happy enough to possess it and thankful, if we are not, that others possess it for our pleasure.
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We find things beautiful because we recognize them and contrariwise we find things beautiful because their novelty surprises us.
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All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
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Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.
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There is no object to life. To nature nothing matters but the continuation of the species.
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There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.
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The great trues are too important to be new.
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It was such a beautiful day I decided to stay in bed.
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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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If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
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We do not write because we want to we write because we have to.
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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.
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