Quotes from W. Somerset Maugham

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

Any nation that thinks more of its ease and comfort than its freedom will soon lose its freedom and the ironical thing about it is that it will lose its ease and comfort too.

There is only one thing about which I am certain, and that is that there is very little about which one can be certain.

Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.

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

If a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him, it's his fault, not hers.

Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

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.

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.

American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.

An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.

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

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

D'you call life a bad job Never We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.

Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.

From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.

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

Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present.

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.

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

Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.