"The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. "
— W. Somerset Maugham

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"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."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"It’s a very funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"'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.'"
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times."
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Moon and Sixpence)

"There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"When a woman loves you she's not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she's weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her."
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Moon and Sixpence)

"The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"I'll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell... their heart's in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"Only a mediocre person is always at his best. "
— W. Somerset Maugham

"Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to wchich he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"The love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned"
— W. Somerset Maugham

"It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and you were my whole life. It is not very pleasant to realize that to you it was only an episode."
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Painted Veil)

"Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed."
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Moon and Sixpence)

"Cronshaw stopped for a moment to drink. He had pondered for twenty years the problem whether he loved liquor because it made him talk or whether he loved conversation because it made him thirsty."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"What d'you suppose I care if I'm a gentleman or not? If I were a gentleman I shouldn't waste my time with a vulgar slut like you."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation. "
— W. Somerset Maugham

"For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay..."
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Razor's Edge)

"It was one of the queer things of life that you saw a person every day for months and were so intimate with him that you could not imagine existence without him; then separation came, and everything went on in the same way, and the companion who had seemed essential proved unnecessary."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"If a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him, it's his fault, not hers."
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Painted Veil)

"I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos"
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Painted Veil)

"I have nothing but contempt for the people who despise money. They are hypocrites or fools. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off. The only thing to be careful about is that you do not pay more than a shilling for the shilling you earn. You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"'I had no illusions about you,' he said. 'I knew you were silly and frivolous and empty-headed. But I loved you. I knew that your aims and ideals were vulgar and commonplace. But I loved you. I knew that you were second-rate. But I loved you. It's comic when I think how hard I tried to be amused by the things that amused you and how anxious I was to hide from you that I wasn't ignorant and vulgar and scandal-mongering and stupid. I knew how frightened you were of intelligence and I did everything I could to make you think me as big a fool as the rest of the men you knew. I knew that you'd only married me for convenience. I loved you so much, I didn't care. Most people, as far as I can see, when they're in love with someone and the love isn't returned feel that they have a grievance. They grow angry and bitter. I wasn't like that. I never expected you to love me, I didn't see any reason that you should. I never thought myself very lovable. I was thankful to be allowed to love you and I was enraptured when now and then I thought you were pleased with me or when I noticed in your eyes a gleam of good-humored affection. I tried not to bore you with my love; I knew I couldn't afford to do that and I was always on the lookout for the first sign that you were impatient with my affection. What most husbands expect as a right I was prepared to receive as a favor.'"
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Painted Veil)

"I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't.
W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil, 1925 "
— W. Somerset Maugham

"Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognize the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life -- their pleasure."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"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."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard)

"Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Moon And Sixpence)

"There is no cruelty greater than a woman's to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an insane irritation."
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Moon and Sixpence)

"But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment you experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is the weakness in the character of a great man which may make him less admirable but certainly more interesting.

Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu..."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continnue to love a changed person.
"
— W. Somerset Maugham

"Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination."
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Moon and Sixpence)

"It wasn't until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say "I don't know."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"Tradition is a guide and not a jailer. "
— W. Somerset Maugham

"His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless; he was vain of the wider knowledge he had acquired from the perusal of so many books, his mind was alert, and he had not the skill to hide his contempt for his companions' stupidity. They complained that he was conceited; and, since he excelled only in matters which to them were unimportant, they asked satirically what he had to be conceited about. He was developing a sense of humour, and found that he had a knack of saying bitter things, which caught people on the raw; he said them because they amused him, hardly realising how much they hurt, and was much offended when he found that his victims regarded him with active dislike. The humiliations he suffered when he first went to school had caused in him a shrinking from his fellows which he could never entirely overcome; he remained shy and silent. But though he did everything to alienate the sympathy of other boys he longed with all his heart for the popularity which to some was so easily accorded. These from his distance he admired extravagantly; and though he was inclined to be more sarcastic with them than with others, though he made little jokes at their expense, he would have given anything to change places with them."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)