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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.
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
Must
Mortals
Even
Saint
Avoid
Digression
Sin
Venial
Theater
Strenuously
May
Dramatist
Human
Inclination
Humans
Mortal
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
Perhaps the most important use of money - It saves time. Life is so short, and there's so much to do, one can't afford to waste a minute and just think how much you waste, for instance, in walking from place to place instead of going by bus and in going by bus instead of by taxi.
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The essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity.
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There are few things so pleasant as a picnic eaten in perfect comfort.
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Art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach man humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action.
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Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.
W. Somerset Maugham
The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
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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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As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue.
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A woman may be as wicked as she likes, but if she isn't pretty it won't do her much good.
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Success. I don't believe it has any effect on me. For one thing I always expected it.
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It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.
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He knew that all things human are transitory and therefore that it must cease one day or another. He looked forward to that day with eager longing. Love was like a parasite in his heart, nourishing a hateful existence on his life's blood it absorbed his existence so intensely that he could take pleasure in nothing else.
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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.
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Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.
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It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.
W. Somerset Maugham
As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.
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Common sense and nature will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult.
W. Somerset Maugham
if you'd ever had a grown-up daughter you'd know that by comparison a bucking steer is easy to manage. And as to knowing what goes on inside her - well, it's much better to pretend you're the simple, innocent old fool she almost certainly takes you for.
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Life is really very fantastic, and one has to have a peculiar sense of humour to see the fun of it. [Virtue]
W. Somerset Maugham
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
