793 Quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

It is a nuisance that knowledge can only be acquired by hard work.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.

You must not pursue a success, but fly from it.

We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.

You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.

D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.

I think I was a little disappointed in her. I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do now, and I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. I did not realize how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in the same human heart.

Illusions are like umbrellas - you no sooner get them than you lose them, and the loss always leaves a little painful wound.

Because a man can write great works he is none the less a man.