The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“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.” (The Moon and Sixpence Quotes)
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“Conversion may come under many shapes, and it may be brought about in many ways. With some men it needs a cataclysm, as a stone may be broken to fragments by the fury of a torrent; but with some it comes gradually, as a stone may be worn away by the ceaseless fall of a drop of water.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“I have always been a little disconcerted by the passion women have for behaving beautifully at the death–bed of those they love. Sometimes it seems as if they grudge the longevity which postpones their chance of an effective scene.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own entertainment.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“Impropriety is the soul of wit.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“It is a grotesque misapprehension which sees in art no more than a craft comprehensible perfectly only to the craftsman: art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.” (The Moon and Sixpence Quotes)
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“It is a riddle which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“It is always distressing when outraged morality does not possess the strength of arm to administer direct chastisement on the sinner.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“It is hard that a man’s exterior should tally so little sometimes with his soul.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“It is one of the defects of my character that I cannot altogether dislike anyone who makes me laugh.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“It was a night so beautiful that your soul seemed hardly able to bear the prison of the body.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“Life isn’t long enough for love and art.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“Perhaps that is the wisdom of life, to tread in your father’s steps, and look neither to the right nor to the left.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“She combined a masculine intelligence with a feminine perversity, and the novels she wrote were original and disconcerting.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“The faculty for myth is innate in the human race. It seizes with avidity upon any incidents, surprising or mysterious, in the career of those who have at all distinguished themselves from their fellows, and invents a legend to which it then attaches a fanatical belief.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“The incidents of the legend become the hero’s surest passport to immortality.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“The moral I draw is the artist should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in the release of the burden of his thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“The most insignificant of Strickland’s works suggests a personality which is strange, tormented, and complex; and it is this surely which prevents even those who do not like his pictures from being indifferent to them; it is this which has excited so curious an interest in his life and character.” (The Moon and Sixpence Quotes)
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“The time has passed when he was an object of ridicule, and it is no longer a mark of eccentricity to defend or of perversity to extol him.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“There is no cruelty greater than a woman’s to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an insane irritation.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“They say a woman always remembers her first lover with affection; but perhaps she does not always remember him.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“To the acute observer no one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“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.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“When a woman loves you she’s not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she’s weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“With infinite patience she prepared to snare and bind me. She wanted to bring me down to her level; she cared nothing for me, she only wanted me to be hers. She was willing to do everything in the world for me except the one thing I wanted: to leave me alone.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“With the superciliousness of extreme youth, I put thirty-five as the utmost limit at which a man might fall in love without making a fool of himself.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
“Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence
