793 Quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

Make him laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured.

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

The value of culture is its effect on character. It avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens that. Its use is for life. Its aim is not beauty but goodness.

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing, too

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.

Imagination grows by exercise.

Cronshaw stopped for a moment to drink. He had pondered for twenty years the problem whether he loved liquor because it made him talk or whether he loved conversation because it made him thirsty.

When we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.