793 Quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

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

When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.

The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.

You Europeans know nothing about America. Because we amass large fortunes you think we care for nothing but money. We are nothing for it; the moment we have it we spend it, sometimes well, sometimes ill, but we spend it. Money is nothing to us; it's merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that we've set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.

Evil can be condoned only if in the beyond it is compensated by good and god himself needs immortality to vindicate his ways to man.

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

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

It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth.

and he loved her suddenly because she loved him.