793 Quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.

The normal is what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to find them all in a single man is hardly to be expected.

Our wise old church...has discovered that if you will act as if you believed belief will be given to you; if you pray with doubt, but pray with sincerity, your doubt will be dispelled; if you will surrender yourself to the beauty of that liturgy the power of which over the human spirit has been proved by the experience of the ages, peace will descend upon you.

We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.

Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.

Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs.

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

It is astonishing how many books I find there is no need for me to read at all.

Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.