Quotes from W. Somerset Maugham

It is not true that suffering ennobles the character happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.

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

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood…. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.

If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?

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

Oh, it's always the same,' she sighed, 'if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.

A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.

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

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.

Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.

The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.

It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humour.

It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.

Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.

Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.

The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.

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.

The tragedy of love is indifference.

Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.