W. Somerset Maugham

Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, depreciating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a common room.

But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design.

We find things beautiful because we recognize them and contrariwise we find things beautiful because their novelty surprises us.

In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.

Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.

He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.

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.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.

I know that you're selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know that you haven't the nerve of a rabbit, I know you're a liar and a humbug, I know that you're utterly contemptible. And the tragic part is'--her face was on a sudden distraught with pain--'the tragic part is that notwithstanding I love you with all my heart.

There are two good things in life - freedom of thought and freedom of action.

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.

I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.

Our wise old church...has discovered that if you will act as if you believed belief will be given to you; if you pray with doubt, but pray with sincerity, your doubt will be dispelled; if you will surrender yourself to the beauty of that liturgy the power of which over the human spirit has been proved by the experience of the ages, peace will descend upon you.

Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. 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.

The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.

Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.

You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.

It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.