The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.” (Of Human Bondage Quotes)
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“Oh, it’s always the same,’ she sighed, ‘if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“It was one of the queer things of life that you saw a person every day for months and were so intimate with him that you could not imagine existence without him; then separation came, and everything went on in the same way, and the companion who had seemed essential proved unnecessary.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“There’s always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“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.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“It’s no good crying over spilt milk, because all the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“It is cruel to discover one’s mediocrity only when it is too late. It does not improve the temper.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“There is nothing so terrible as the pursuit of art by those who have no talent.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.” (Of Human Bondage Quotes)
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“He exulted in the possession of himself once more; he realized how much of the delight of the world he had lost when he was absorbed in that madness which they called love; he had had enough of it; he did not want to be in love anymore if love was that.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“His death had been as futile as his life. He died ingloriously, of a stupid disease, failing once more, even at the end, to accomplish anything.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“I don’t know what it is that makes someone love you, but whatever it is, it’s the only thing that matters, and if it is not there you won’t create it by kindness, or generosity, or anything of that sort.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“The idealist withdrew himself, because he could not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had not the strength to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain, and since his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled himself with despising his fellows.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“There was neither good nor bad there. There were just facts. It was life.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“It looked as though you did not act in a certain way because you thought in a certain way, but rather you thought in a certain way because you were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing to do with it.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“He was not crying for the pain they had caused him, nor for the humiliation he had suffered when they looked at his foot, but with rage at himself because, unable to stand the torture, he had put out his foot of his own accord.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“A thing that had always struck her about the child was that he seemed so collected. She had never seen him cry. And now she realized that his calmness was some instinctive shame of showing his feelings; he hid himself to weep.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“The bright hopes of youth had to be paid for at such a bitter price of disillusionment.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“Men have always formed gods in their own image.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“He was the most inconsiderable creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness.” (Of Human Bondage Quotes)
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“He was thankful not to have to believe in God, for then such a condition of things would be intolerable; one could reconcile oneself to existence only because it was meaningless.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“Saw everything larger than life size, with the outlines blurred, in a golden mist of sentimentality.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“The fact was that he had ceased to believe not for this reason or the other, but because he had not the religious temperament.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves in almost everything that anybody else believes, and he has a very lively sustaining faith in he doesn’t quite know what.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“He saw that nothing was good and nothing was evil; things were merely adapted to an end.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“A laboratory had been fitted up, army classes were instituted; they all said the character of the school was changing. And heaven only knew what further projects Mr. Perkins turned in that untidy head of his.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“Life was not so horrible if it was meaningless, and he faced it with a strange sense of power.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
“What do the circumstances of your life matter if your dreams make you lord paramount of time and space.”
William Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
