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I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?
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
Spirit
Accident
Body
Club
Without
Foot
Self
Accidents
Much
Clubs
Epilepsy
Would
Decide
Dostoyevsky
Feet
Byron
Individual
Conditioned
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
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Tolerance is only another name for indifference.
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There are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity. I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?
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I promised myself that if ever I had some money that I would savor a cigar each day after lunch and dinner. This is the only resolution of my youth that I have kept, and the only realized ambition which has not brought disillusion.
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Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature and the error is ineradicable.
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Conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.
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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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From old habit, unconsciously he thanked God that he no longer believed in Him.
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No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.
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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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The artist can within limits make what he likes of his life... It is only the artist, and maybe the criminal, who can make his own.
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The mathematician who after seeing Phedre asked: 'Qu'est que ca prouve?' was not such a fool as he has been generally made out. No one has ever been able to explain why the Doric temple of Paestum is more beautiful than a glass of cold beer except by bringing in considerations that have nothing to do with beauty.
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Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story.
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The average American can get into the kingdom of heaven much more easily than he can get into the Boulevard St. Germain.
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No married man's ever made up his mind until he's heard what his wife has got to say about it.
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The crown of literature is poetry.
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We do not write as we want, but as we can.
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We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.
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