W. Somerset Maugham

You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.

The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?

Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.

No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.

[Money] is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.

At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.

We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.

You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers. You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you.

By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.

Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness.

The artist produces for the liberation of his soul.

If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be as overpopulated as it is now.

There's no one as transparent as the person who thinks he's devilish deep.

It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.

When married people don't get on they can separate, but if they're not married it's impossible. It's a tie that only death can sever.

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.

When we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.