Quotes from W. Somerset Maugham

You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.

The drama is make-believe. It does not deal with truth but with effect.

He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her.

Love is not always blind and there are few things that cause greater wretchedness than to love with all your heart someone who you know is unworthy of love.

With the superciliousness of extreme youth, I put thirty-five as the utmost limit at which a man might fall in love without making a fool of himself.

People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.

What mean and cruel things men can do for the love of God.

Her tears were partly tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them was gone. She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer.

There's nothing the world loves more than a ready-made description which they can hang on to a man, and so save themselves all trouble in future.

Beauty is an ecstacy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.

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

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

To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

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

In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do.

Did you really cease to love a person because you had been treated cruelly?

It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved.

Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.

The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people cruel and bitter.

The most valuable thing I have learned from life is to regret nothing.

First, cut out all the wisdom, then cut out all the adjectives.

Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom.

Advice to first year medical students: In anatomy, it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.