Quote

We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house.

W. Somerset Maugham

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Like
House
Aunt
Banalities
People
Tell
Manner
Seething
Beautiful
Profound
Banality
Littles
Conversation
Manual
Ideas
Whose
Manuals
Little
Brain
Umbrella
Country
Language
Gardener
Things
Living
Condemned

More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

Image
For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willing avoids the sight of distress.
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence.
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
You see, money to you means freedom to me it means bondage.
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't.
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
As the cosmos are in place, so be it with your life.
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden.
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
Self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion.
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
No married man's ever made up his mind until he's heard what his wife has got to say about it.
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
People are always a little disconcerted when you don't recognize them, they are so important to themselves, it is a shock to discover of what small importance they are to others. [The human element]
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
There is only one thing about which I am certain, and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man.
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one's soul.
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
When a man's in love, he at once makes a pedestal of the Ten Commandments and stands on the top of them with his arms akimbo. When a woman's in love she doesn't care two straws for Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not.
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
Yet magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.
W. Somerset Maugham
Image
Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it.
W. Somerset Maugham