W. Somerset Maugham

I don't understand anything. Life is so strange. I feel like some one who's lived all his life by a duck-pond and suddenly is shown the sea. It makes me a little breathless, and yet it fills me with elation. I don't want to die, I want to live. I'm beginning to feel a new courage. I feel like one of those old sailors who set sail for undiscovered seas and I think my soul hankers for the unknown.

What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?

One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one's soul.

The worst of having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were acting naturally or being tactful too. [The human element]

You know, the Philistines have long since discarded the rack and stake as a means of suppressing the opinions they feared: they've discovered a much more deadly weapon of destruction -- the wisecrack.

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.

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.

She was a fool and he knew it and because he loved her it had made no difference.

Vaguely, as when you are studying a foreign language and read a page which at first you can make nothing of, till a word or a sentence gives you a clue; and on a sudden suspicion, as it were, of the sense flashes across your troubled wits, vaguely she gained an inkling into the workings of Walter's mind. It was like a dark and ominous landscape seen by a flash of lightning and in a moment hidden again by the night. She shuddered at what she saw.

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.

The best style is the style you don't notice.

You cannot write well or much (and I venture the opinion that you cannot write well unless you write much) unless you form a habit.

Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.

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.

If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.

Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art. ~Waddington

I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul's good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed.

It is one of the defects of my character that I cannot altogether dislike anyone who makes me laugh.

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.

If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.

I know that I shall die struggling for breath, and I know that I shall be horribly afraid. I know that I shall not be able to keep myself from regretting bitterly the life that has brought me to such a pass; but I disown that regret. I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.