793 Quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

He could not understand what strange emotion distracted him; he seemed to feel something infinitely attractive, and yet he was repelled and horrified.

When a woman’s amorous advances are declined by a man she is apt to draw one or two conclusions; one is that he is homosexual and the other is that he is impotent.

I guessed that he would have a passionate bedfellow that night, but would never know to what prickings of conscience he owed her ardor.

Actors are rotten, not parts.

Everything passed, and what trace of its passage remained? It seemed to Kitty that they were all, the human race, like the drops of water in that river and they flowed on, each so close to the other and yet so far apart, a nameless flood, to the sea. When all things lasted so short a time and nothing mattered very much, it seemed pitiful that men, attaching an absurd importance to trivial objects, should make themselves and one another so unhappy.

It was like making a blunder at a party; there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it.

Sir Walter Raleigh is more safely enshrined in the memory of mankind because he set his cloak for the Virgin Queen to walk on than because he carried the english name to undiscovered countries.

I have great affection for you, Roy" I answered, "but I don't think you are the sort of person I'd care to have breakfast with.

On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it, so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment.