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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
Special
Stalled
Knowledge
Attach
Wrong
Description
Able
Correct
Find
Merit
Picture
Case
Cases
Motorcar
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.
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Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
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Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.
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The humorist has a good eye for the humbug he does not always recognize the saint.
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People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.
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I thought it was only in revealed religion that a mistranslation improved the sense.
W. Somerset Maugham
Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs.
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What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.
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Thank God, I can look at a sunset now without having to think how to describe it
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Beauty is an ecstasy it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.
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The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain, just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes.
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A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her...but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.
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It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.
W. Somerset Maugham
Advice to first year medical students: In anatomy, it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.
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The good traveler has the gift of surprise.
W. Somerset Maugham
Comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly.
W. Somerset Maugham
It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is.
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.
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When married people don't get on they can separate, but if they're not married it's impossible. It's a tie that only death can sever.
W. Somerset Maugham
Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.
W. Somerset Maugham
