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It is bad enough to know the past it would be intolerable to know the future.
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
Future
Past
Enough
Would
Intolerable
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
I'll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell... their heart's in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ.
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Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom.
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Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness.
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Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.
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Writing is a wholetime job: no professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it.
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Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.
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A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there's only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.
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It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. - Of Human Bondage
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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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If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.
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It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late. It does not improve the temper.
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When things are at their worst, I find something always happens.
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You can never know enough about your characters
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It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise.
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She was a fool and he knew it and because he loved her it had made no difference.
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Because a man can write great works he is none the less a man.
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The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?
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It was like making a blunder at a party there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it.
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An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.
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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.
W. Somerset Maugham
