793 Quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.

An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

Love was only the dirty trick nature played on us to achieve continuation of the species.

Poker's the only game fit for a grown man. Then, your hand is against every man's, and every man's is against yours.

The greatest tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.

Her lips were like living fire. He could not take his own away. He forgot everything.

I'm not only my spirit but my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoevsky Dostoevsky without his epilepsy?

It was Sunday, and there was a feeling of quietness.