793 Quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn’t be as overpopulated as it is now.

Unfortunately sometimes one can’t do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.

Oh, it’s always the same,? she sighed, ’if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.

When you’re eighteen your emotions are violent, but they’re not durable.

Death doesn’t affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn’t concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.

One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one’s soul.

A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there’s only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.

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