W. Somerset Maugham Life Quotations

It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.

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

My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.

I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.

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

Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.

We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.

The passing moment is all we can be sure of; it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it.

The life force is vigorous. The delight that accompanies it counter-balances all the pains and hardships that confront men. It makes life worth living.

The tragedy of love is indifference.

Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe.

Common sense and nature will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult.

..as the cosmos are in place, so be it with your life...

I was a stray acquaintance whom he had never seem before and would never see again, a wandered for a moment through his monotonous life, and some starved impulse left him to lay bare his soul. I have in this way learned more about men in a night than I could if I had known them for 10 years. If you are interested in human nature, it is one of the greatest pleasures of travel.

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

Impropriety is the soul of wit.

Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.

There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.