William Somerset Maugham Quotes

William Somerset Maugham

William Somerset Maugham CH was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German university. He became a medical student in London and qualified as a physician in 1897. (William Somerset Maugham Quotes)

“A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil

“A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Razor’s Edge

“A woman attracts men by her charm and holds them by their vices.”
William Somerset Maugham
Theatre

“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.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence

“Almost all the people who’ve had the most effect on me I seem to have met by chance, yet looking back it seems as though I couldn’t but have met them.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Razor’s Edge

“American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Razor’s Edge

“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 also a Gift of God, one of the most rare and precious, and we should be thankful if we are happy enough to possess it and thankful, if we are not, that others possess it for our pleasure.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil

“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

“But their fondest thoughts went to the two sons who had brought honour and glory to their ancient name.”
William Somerset Maugham
Catalina

“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

“Do not pay any attention to that gentleman. His morals are detestable, and he seeks only to lead you from the narrow path of virtue.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Magician

“Dr Porhoët knew that a diversity of interests, though it adds charm to a man’s personality, tends to weaken him. To excel one’s fellows it is needful to be circumscribed.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Magician

“Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower and he communicates with the other prisoners, who form mankind, by conventional signs that have not quite the same meaning for them as for himself.”
William Somerset Maugham
Collected Short Stories

“Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.”
William Somerset Maugham
Summing Up

“For myself I can say that, having had every good thing that money can buy, an experience like another, I could part without a pang with every possession I have. We live in uncertain times and our all may yet be taken from us. With enough plain food to satisfy my small appetite, a room to myself, books from a public library, pens and paper, I should regret nothing.” (William Somerset Maugham Quotes)
William Somerset Maugham
Summing Up

“From the standpoint of what eternity is it better to have read a thousand books than to have ploughed a million furrows?”
William Somerset Maugham
Collected Short Stories

“From time to time, however, writers have engaged in politics. Its effect on them as writers has been injurious.”
William Somerset Maugham
Summing Up

“Happily men don’t realise how stupid they are, or half the world would commit suicide. Knowledge is a will-of-the-wisp, fluttering ever out of the traveller’s reach; and a weary journey must be endured before it is even seen. It is only when a man knows a good deal that he discovers how unfathomable is his ignorance. The man who knows nothing is satisfied that there is nothing to know, consequently that he knows everything; and you may more easily persuade him that the moon is made of green cheese than that he is not omniscient.”
William Somerset Maugham
Mrs Craddock

“He left the place with a singular feeling that the man he had just interviewed had much to tell him, but no intention of telling it.”
William Somerset Maugham
Collected Short Stories

“He seemed to have a positive instinct for operating, and his hand and his brain worked in a manner that appeared almost automatic. He never hesitated, and he had no fear of failure.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Magician

“He was no longer the awkward man of social intercourse, who was sufficiently conscious of his limitations not to talk of what he did not understand, and sincere enough not to express admiration for what he did not like.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Magician

“He was very tall, very thin, very fair. He wore a very high collar and very long hair, and held himself like an exhausted lily.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Magician

“Heaven knows, I’m the easiest woman in the world to get on with, but I will not be bullied by any man. After all, I have my self-respect to think of.”
William Somerset Maugham
Collected Short Stories

“Her emotions were always as unstable as the light winds of April”
William Somerset Maugham
Mrs Craddock

“How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and you were my whole life. It is not very pleasant to realize that to you it was only an episode.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil

“I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don’t.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil

“I could see that Isabel listened to him with growing exasperation. Larry had no notion that he was driving a dagger in her heart and with his every detached word twisting it in the wound. But when she spoke it was with a faint smile on her lips.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Razor’s Edge

“I did not hesitate to put the question that came to the tip of my tongue. After all, if you want to know something the best way is to ask.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Razor’s Edge

“I do not believe that I am a vindictive man, but when the immortal gods take a hand in the matter it is pardonable to observe the results with complacency.”
William Somerset Maugham
Collected Short Stories

“I do not know what put the idea of China into his head, but at first he must have thrust it aside with violent repulsion; and perhaps the very violence of his repulsion impressed the idea on him, for he found it haunting him.”
William Somerset Maugham
On A Chinese Screen

“I do not like these painted faces that look all alike; and I think women are foolish to dull their expression and obscure their personality with powder, rouge, and lipstick.”
William Somerset Maugham
Collected Short Stories

“I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence

“I happen to think we’ve set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Razor’s Edge

“I have a notion that when the intelligent look for thought in a playhouse, they show less intelligence than one would have expected of them. Thought is a private thing. It is the offspring of reason.”
William Somerset Maugham
Summing Up

“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 have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil

“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil

“I have learnt by experience that when a book makes a sensation it is just as well to wait a year before you read it.”
William Somerset Maugham
Collected Short Stories

“I myself stand on one side and the rest of the world on the other. There is an abyss between, that no power can cross, a strange barrier more insuperable than a mountain of fire. Husband and wife know nothing of one another. However ardent their passion, however intimate their union, they are never one; they are scarcely more to one another than strangers.”
William Somerset Maugham
Mrs Craddock

“I only wanted to suggest to you that self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Razor’s Edge

“I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart’s blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Razor’s Edge

“I was interested in this because it bore out an opinion of mine that philosophy is an affair of character rather than of logic: the philosopher believes not according to evidence, but according to his own temperament; and his thinking merely serves to make reasonable what his instinct regards as true.” (William Somerset Maugham Quotes)
William Somerset Maugham
On A Chinese Screen

“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

“I wrote one of these books because I had to have enough money to carry me on for the following year; the other because I was at the time much taken with a young person of extravagant tastes and the gratification of my desires was frustrated by the attentions of more opulent admirers who were able to provide the luxuries that her frivolous soul hankered after. I had nothing much to offer but a serious disposition and a sense of humour.”
William Somerset Maugham
Summing Up

“If a man hasn’t what’s necessary to make a woman love him, it’s his fault, not hers.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil

“If a wise man studies the science of the occult, his duty is not to laugh at everything, but to seek patiently, slowly, perseveringly, the truth that may be concealed in the night of these illusions.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Magician

“If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil

“If my eyes show me what all my training assures me is impossible, I can only conclude that my eyes deceive me.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Magician

“Impropriety is the soul of wit.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence

“In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honesty is not only the best but the only policy.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Razor’s Edge

“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.”
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

“It was a pity that with his great qualities, his unselfishness and honor, his intelligence and sensibility, he should be so unlovable.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil

“It was difficult for her to preserve that haughty, sullen, and coldly indifferent demeanour that appears to be essential to the mannequin as she sails in with deliberate steps, turns round slowly and, with an air of contempt for the universe equaled only by the camel’s, sails out.”
William Somerset Maugham
Collected Short Stories

“It was not for me to leave the world and retire to a cloister, but to live in the world and love the objects of the world, not indeed for themselves, but for the Infinite that is in them.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Razor’s Edge

“I’ve learnt by long experience that people generally keep their vices to themselves, but insist on throwing their virtues in your face.”
William Somerset Maugham
Mrs Craddock

“Life isn’t long enough for love and art.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence

“Marriage is always a hopeless idiocy for a woman who has enough of her own to live upon.”
William Somerset Maugham
Mrs Craddock

“Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can.”
William Somerset Maugham
Theatre

“No one ever died of love yet,” said the prioress with a savage bitterness.”
William Somerset Maugham
Catalina

“Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.”
William Somerset Maugham

“Nothing is more tedious than to talk with persons who treat your most obvious remarks as startling paradoxes and Edward suffered likewise from that passion for argument which is the bad talkers’ substitution for conversation. People who cannot talk are always proud of their dialectic. They want to modify your tritest observations and even if you suggest the day is fine, insist on arguing it out.”
William Somerset Maugham
Mrs Craddock

“Omniscience would be incomplete without it and compassion repellent. A sense of humour.”
William Somerset Maugham
Catalina

“One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one’s life with her.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil

“One of my cherished ideas is that it is impossible to love without imagination”
William Somerset Maugham
The Magician

“One often hears of people who talk like a book. M. de Steenvoorde talked like a magazine, not of course a magazine devoted to light literature and the distraction of an idle hour, but a magazine of sound learning and influential opinion.”
William Somerset Maugham
On A Chinese Screen

“Only a woman knows what a woman can do.”
William Somerset Maugham
Theatre

“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

“People don’t want reasons to do what they’d like to. They want excuses.”
William Somerset Maugham
Theatre

“People say that suffering ennobles one; it’s a lie, it only makes one brutal.”
William Somerset Maugham
Mrs Craddock

“People who live on volcanoes forget all about it; and you’d soon get used to sitting on barrels of gunpowder if you had no armchair.”
William Somerset Maugham
Mrs Craddock

“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

“She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her.” (William Somerset Maugham Quotes)
William Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil

“She had asked if he was good-looking. ‘No, I don’t think he is,’ answered Margaret, ‘but he’s very paintable.’ ‘That is an answer which has the advantage of sounding well and meaning nothing,’ smiled Susie.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Magician

“She had in point of fact by now made up her mind to accept it, but she well knew that men like to think they decide matters for themselves.”
William Somerset Maugham
Catalina

“She had learnt long ago that common sense, intelligence, good-nature, and strength of character were unimportant in comparison with a pretty face.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Magician

“She knew that she was unstable as water and variable as the summer winds.”
William Somerset Maugham
Mrs Craddock

“She says it’s really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil

“She took me into a little anteroom, near the entrance, and there lying on a table under a counterpane were four new-born babes.
They had just been washed and put into long clothes. The counterpane was lifted off. They lay side by side, on their backs, four tiny wriggling mites, very red in the face, rather cross perhaps because they had been bathed, and very hungry.
Their eyes seemed preternaturally large.
They were so small, so helpless: you were forced to smile when you looked at them and at the same time you felt a lump in your throat.”
William Somerset Maugham
On A Chinese Screen

“Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil

“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

“Suffering did not make them more than men; it made them less than men”
William Somerset Maugham
Summing Up

“The dead look so terribly dead when they’re dead.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Razor’s Edge

“The devil is a good actor,” smiled Domingo.”
William Somerset Maugham
Catalina

“The disadvantages and dangers of the author’s calling are offset by an advantage so great as to make all its difficulties, disappointments, and maybe hardships, unimportant…Nothing befalls him that he cannot transmute into a stanza, a song, or a story, and having done this, be rid of it. The artist is the only free man.”
William Somerset Maugham
Summing Up

“The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Razor’s Edge

“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 full moon, sailing across an unclouded sky, made a pathway on the broad sea that led to the boundless realms of Forever.”
William Somerset Maugham
Collected Short Stories

“The great have no friends, dear Blasco. It is the price they must pay for their greatness.”
William Somerset Maugham
Catalina

“The incidents of the legend become the hero’s surest passport to immortality.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence

“The later letters were as tender and as delightful as the first, but the tone was different. She was vaguely suspicious of their humour, she had the instinctive mistrust of her sex for that unaccountable quality, and she discerned in them now a flippancy which perplexed her. She was not quite certain that the Edward who wrote to her now was the same Edward that she had known.”
William Somerset Maugham
Collected Short Stories

“The Magus,the sorcerer, the alchemist, are seized with the fascination of the unknown; and they desire a greatness that is inaccessible to mankind.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Magician

“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 difficult thing for a wise woman to do is to pretend to be a foolish one.”
William Somerset Maugham
Mrs Craddock

“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.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence

“The only excuse for an old maid is that she has pined thirty years for a lover who is buried under the snowdrops or has married another.”
William Somerset Maugham
Mrs Craddock

“The silence was enchanting. Infinite space seemed to enter it, and my spirit, alone with the stars, seemed capable of any adventure.”
William Somerset Maugham
Summing Up

“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 value of culture is its effect on character. It avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens that. Its use is for life. Its aim is not beauty but goodness. Too often, as we know, it gives rise to self-complacency.”
William Somerset Maugham
Summing Up

“The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence

“There are many foolish people in the world and when a man in a rather high position puts on no frills, slaps them on the back, and tells them he’ll do anything in the world for them, they are very likely to think him clever.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil

“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

“There is nothing like a knowledge of farming and an acquaintance with the habits of domestic animals to teach a man how to manage his wife.”
William Somerset Maugham
Mrs Craddock

“There is nothing so difficult as to persuade men that they are ignorant. Bertha, exaggerating the seriousness of the affair, thought it charlatanry to undertake a post without knowledge and without capacity. Fortunately that is not the opinion of the majority, or the government of this enlightened country could not proceed.”
William Somerset Maugham
Mrs Craddock

“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

“Those words, though heaven only knew how often she had heard them, still gave her her thrill. They braced her like a tonic. Life acquired significance. She was about to step from the world of make-believe into the world of reality.” (William Somerset Maugham Quotes)
William Somerset Maugham
Theatre

“Time dulls the most exquisite emotions and softens the most heart-rending grief.”
William Somerset Maugham
Mrs Craddock

“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

“Unfortunately sometimes one can’t do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Razor’s Edge

“We can only guess at the thoughts and emotions of our neighbors. Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower and he communicates with the other prisoners, who form mankind, by conventional signs that have not quite the same meaning for them as for himself.”
William Somerset Maugham
Collected Short Stories

“We know very little even of the persons we know most intimately; we do not know them enough to transfer them to the pages of a book and make human beings of them. People are too elusive, too shadowy, to be copied; and they are also too incoherent and contradictory.”
William Somerset Maugham
Summing Up

“Well, Henry, if I were you I wouldn’t worry”, said the lawyer. “My belief is that your boy’s born lucky, and in the long run that’s better than to be born clever or rich.”
William Somerset Maugham
Collected Short Stories

“What he taught was very simple. He taught that we are all greater than we know and that wisdom is the means to freedom.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Razor’s Edge

“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

“When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten son.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Razor’s Edge

“When I’ve seen you go into an empty room I’ve sometimes wanted to open the door suddenly, but I’ve been afraid to in case I found nobody there.”
William Somerset Maugham
Theatre

“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 old and young great sorrow is followed by a sleepless night, and with the old great joy is as disturbing; but you, I suppose, finds happiness more natural and its rest is not disturbed by it.”
William Somerset Maugham
Mrs Craddock

“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 by nature spiteful and intolerant; when you find one who exercises charity, it proves that she wants it very badly herself.”
William Somerset Maugham
Mrs Craddock

“Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence

“Women are often under the impression that men are much more madly in love with them than they really are.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil

“Ye cannot find out the depth of the heart of man, neither can ye perceive the things that he thinketh; then how can ye search out God, that hath made all these things, and know His mind, or comprehend His purpose?”
William Somerset Maugham
Catalina

“Yet magic is no more 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.”
William Somerset Maugham
The Magician

“You cannot write unless you write much.”
William Somerset Maugham
Summing Up

“You don’t know the difference between truth and make-believe. You never stop acting. It’s second nature to you. You act when there’s a party here. You act to the servants, you act to father, you act to me. To me you act the part of the fond, indulgent, celebrated mother. You don’t exist, you’re only the innumerable parts you’ve played. I’ve often wondered if there was ever a you or if you were never anything more than a vehicle for all these other people that you’ve pretended to be. When I’ve seen you go into an empty room I’ve sometimes wanted to open the door suddenly, but I’ve been afraid to in case I found nobody there.”
William Somerset Maugham
Theatre