The Razor's Edge

by W. Somerset Maugham

For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the 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, you can only know them if you have lived them.

“Nous autres Américains, we Americans,” he said, “like change. It is at once our weakness and our strength.”

We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.

“What are you to do with a boy who never argues with you, but does exactly what he likes and when you get mad at him just says he’s sorry and lets you storm?

You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers. You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you.” “You may be right. I don’t mind if I make mistakes. It may be that in one of the blind alleys I may find something to my purpose.”

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

I, having nothing to say, said nothing.

“I don’t think I shall ever find peace till I make up my mind about things,” he said gravely. He hesitated. “It’s very difficult to put into words. The moment you try to you feel embarrassed. You say to yourself: ‘Who am I that I should bother my head about this, that, and the other? Perhaps it’s only because I’m a conceited prig. Wouldn’t it be better to follow the beaten track and let what’s coming to you come?’ And then you think of a fellow who an hour before was full of life and fun, and he’s lying dead; it’s all so cruel and so meaningless. It’s hard not to ask yourself what life is all about and whether there’s any sense to it or whether it’s all a tragic blunder of blind fate.”

Isabel had been brought up in a certain way and she accepted the principles that had been instilled into her. She did not think of money, because she had never known what it was not to have all she needed, but she was instinctively aware of its importance. It meant power, influence, and social consequence. It was the natural and obvious thing that a man should earn it. That was his plain life’s work.

Sometimes a very small thing will have an effect on you out of all proportion to the event.

“And after that? What are you going to do with all this wisdom?” “If I ever acquire wisdom I suppose I shall be wise enough to know what to do with

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

Her common sense assured her that if you wanted to get on in this world you must accept its conventions, and not to do what everybody else did clearly pointed to instability.

Common sense is never very sympathetic, is it?

Most people when they’re in love invent every kind of reason to persuade themselves that it’s only sensible to do what they want. I suppose that’s why there are so many disastrous marriages. They are like those who put their affairs in the hands of someone they know to be a crook, but who happens to be an intimate friend because, unwilling to believe that a crook is a crook first and a friend afterward, they are convinced that, however dishonest he may be with others, he won’t be so with them.

nothing is easier than to bear other people’s calamities with fortitude,

American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.”

One of her most amiable traits was that she was never affronted by the naked truth.

“Passion doesn’t count the cost. Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. If he meant what I think, he meant that when passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honor is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive.

I have never believed very much in women’s intuition; it fits in too neatly with what they want to believe to persuade me that it is trustworthy;

“You know, at one time I made quite a little reputation for myself as a humorist by the simple process of telling the truth. It came as such a surprise to most people that they thought I was being funny.”

“Well, Larry is, I think, the only person I’ve ever met who’s completely disinterested. It makes his actions seem peculiar. We’re not used to persons who do things simply for the love of God whom they don’t believe in.”

She’d lived in heaven and when she lost it she couldn’t put up with the common earth of common men, but in despair plunged headlong into hell. I can imagine that if she couldn’t drink the nectar of the gods any more she thought she might as well drink bathroom gin.”

What are those lines of Landor’s? ‘I’ve warmed both hands …’ ”

“I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art; I warmed both hands before the fire of Life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart.”

“My dear fellow, at my age one can’t afford to fall out. You don’t think I’ve moved in the highest circles for nearly fifty years without realizing that if you’re not seen everywhere you’re forgotten.” I wondered if he realized what a lamentable confession he was then making.

When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten son.”

I couldn’t but surmise that the devil, looking at the cruel wars that Christianity has occasioned, the persecutions, the tortures Christian has inflicted on Christian, the unkindness, the hypocrisy, the intolerance, must consider the balance sheet with complacency. And when he remembers that it has laid upon mankind the bitter burden of the sense of sin that has darkened the beauty of the starry night and cast a baleful shadow on the passing pleasures of a world to be enjoyed, he must chuckle as he murmurs: give the devil his due.

“Can anything in the world be more practical than to learn how to live to best advantage?”

All important persons have about them someone in a subordinate position who has their ear. These dependents are very susceptible to slights, and, when they are not treated as they think they should be, will by well-directed shafts, constantly repeated, poison the minds of their patrons against those who have provoked their animosity. It is well to keep in with them. This Elliott knew better than anybody and he had always a friendly word and a cordial smile for the poor relation, the old maidservant, or the trusted secretary.

It made me sad to think how silly, useless, and trivial his life had been. It mattered very little now that he had gone to so many parties and had hobnobbed with all those princes, dukes, and counts. They had forgotten him already.

I knew I was very ignorant; I didn’t know anyone I could turn to and I wanted to learn, so I began to read at haphazard.

The monks told me that God had created the world for his glorification. That didn’t seem to me a very worthy object. Did Beethoven create his symphonies for his glorification? I don’t believe it. I believe he created them because the music in his soul demanded expression and then all he tried to do was to make them as perfect as he knew how.

“I used to learn to the monks repeating the Lord’s Prayer; I wondered how they could continue to pray without misgiving to their heavenly father to give them their daily bread. Do children beseech their earthly father to give them sustenance? They expect him to do it, they neither feel nor need to feel gratitude to him for doing it, and we have only blame for a man who brings children into the world that he can’t or won’t provide for. It seemed to me that if an omnipotent creator was not prepared to provide his creatures with the necessities of existence, material and spiritual, he’d have done better not to create them.”

It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.

“But that wasn’t the chief thing that bothered me: I couldn’t reconcile myself with that preoccupation with sin which, so far as I could tell, was never entirely absent from the monks’ thoughts. I’d known a lot of fellows in the air corps. Of course they got drunk when they got a chance, and had a girl whenever they could, and used foul language; we had one or two bad hats: one fellow was arrested for passing rubber checks and was sent to prison for six months; it wasn’t altogether his fault; he’d never had any money before, and when he got more than he’d ever dreamt of having, it went to his head. I’d known bad men in Paris, and when I got back to Chicago I knew more, but for the most part their badness was due to heredity, which they couldn’t help, or to their environment, which they didn’t choose: I’m not sure that society wasn’t more responsible for their crimes than they were. If I’d been God I couldn’t have brought myself to condemn one of them, not even the worst, to eternal damnation. Father Ensheim was broad-minded; he thought that hell was the deprivation of God’s presence, but if that is such an intolerable punishment that it can justly be called hell, can one conceive that a good God can inflict it? After all, He created men: if He so created them that it was possible for them to sin, it was because He willed it.

“If an all-good and all-powerful God created the world, why did He create evil? The monks said, so that man by conquering the wickedness in him, by resisting temptation, by accepting pain and sorrow and misfortune as the trials sent by God to purify him, might at long last be made worthy to receive His grace. It seemed to me like sending a fellow with a message to some place and just to make it harder for him you constructed a maze that he had to get through, then dug a moat that he had to swim, and finally built a wall that he had to scale. I wasn’t prepared to believe in an all-wise God who hadn’t common sense. I didn’t see why you shouldn’t believe in a God who hadn’t created the world, but had to make the best of the bad job he’d found, a being enormously better, wise, and greater than man, who strove with the evil he hadn’t made and who you hoped might in the end overcome it. But on the other hand, I didn’t see why you should.

I read a lot. I don’t know that I learnt much except that my ignorance was abysmal.

‘A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?’

“The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.”

I myself think that the need to worship is no more than the survival of an old remembrance of cruel gods that had to be propitiated. I believe that God is within me or nowhere.

He taught that we are all greater than we know and that wisdom is the means to freedom. He taught that it is not essential to salvation to retire from the world, but only to renounce the self. He taught that work done with no selfish interest purifies the mind and that duties are opportunities afforded to man to sink his separate self and become one with the universal self.

Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.

when you’ve come to the conclusion that something is inevitable all you can do is to make the best of it.”

I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.”

“When I’m really fond of anyone, though I deplore his wrongdoing it doesn’t make me less fond of him.