793 Quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

When feeling is the gauge you can snap your fingers at logic, and when your logic is weak that is very agreeable.

In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally.

Those words, though heaven only knew how often she had heard them, still gave her her thrill. They braced her like a tonic. Life acquired significance. She was about to step from the world of make-believe into the world of reality.

We Americans... like change. It is at once our weakness and our strength.

From a social standpoint the man of science does not exist.

To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults.

There was a curious sense of apprehension in her heart. He was certainly very handsome. It would be thrilling to be the wife of the Governor of Bengal and very nice to be grand and have the ADCs [Aide de Camps] running about to do one’s bidding

Melville, by his own account, spent four months in the valley. He was well treated. He made friends with a girl called Fayaway, swam and boated with her, and except for his fear of being eaten was happy enough.

[Emerson] had a gift of the picturesque phrase, but too often it is empty of meaning. He is a nimble skater who cuts elegant and complicated figures on a surface of frozen platitudes. Perhaps he would have been a better writer if he had not been quite so good a man.