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Beauty is an ecstasy it is as simple as hunger.
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
Ecstasy
Hunger
Beauty
Simple
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
For my part I cannot believe in a God who is angry with me because I do not believe in him. I cannot believe in a God who is less tolerant than I. I cannot believe in a God who has neither humour nor common sense.
W. Somerset Maugham
Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more than the opium of an intelligentsia.
W. Somerset Maugham
Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments it is a whole-time job.
W. Somerset Maugham
When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.
W. Somerset Maugham
We find things beautiful because we recognize them and contrariwise we find things beautiful because their novelty surprises us.
W. Somerset Maugham
A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?
W. Somerset Maugham
Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
W. Somerset Maugham
[Money] is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.
W. Somerset Maugham
Man's desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy (conscience) within his gates and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd.
W. Somerset Maugham
At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
W. Somerset Maugham
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
The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
W. Somerset Maugham
In religion above all things the only thing of use is an objective truth. The only God that is of use is a being who is personal, supreme and good, and whose existence is as certain as that two and two make four.
W. Somerset Maugham
By the time an actor knows how to act any sort of part he is often too old to act any but a few.
W. Somerset Maugham
Perhaps it would have been possible to see in him a new Prometheus...the hero who for the good of mankind exposes himself to the agonies of the damned...undaunted by failure, by an unceasing effort of courage holding despair at bay, doggedly persistent in the face of self-doubt, which is the artist's bitterest enemy.
W. Somerset Maugham
A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else believes.
W. Somerset Maugham
A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.
W. Somerset Maugham
The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so, and by the manipulation of his plot, he can engage the reader's attention so that he does not perceive the violence that has been done to him.
W. Somerset Maugham
I don't know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God.
W. Somerset Maugham
Perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull.
W. Somerset Maugham
