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Now the answer ... is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.
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
Faces
Reason
Unpalatable
Men
Plain
Life
Atheism
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More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her.
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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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Was it necessary to tell me that you wanted nothing in the world but me?' The corners of his mouth drooped peevishly. Oh, my dear, it's rather hard to take quite literally the things a man says when he's in love with you.' Didn't you mean them?' At the moment.
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Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
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I [Death] was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.
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A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.
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There's nothing the world loves more than a ready-made description which they can hang on to a man, and so save themselves all trouble in future.
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The worst of having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were acting naturally or being tactful too. [The human element]
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No man in his heart is quite so cynical as a well-bred woman.
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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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Impropriety is the soul of wit.
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It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.
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Almost all the people who’ve had the most effect on me I seem to have met by chance, yet looking back it seems as though I couldn’t but have met them.
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Marco Polo tells the tale of The Old Man in the Mountains and how he recruits new members to his Band of Assassins by means of drugs, beautiful women, lush gardens, and religious promises. The unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.
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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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Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.
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I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos.
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It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule.
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A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.
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We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.
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