Mrs Craddock Quotes

“The most difficult thing for a wise woman to do is to pretend to be a foolish one.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“Happily men don't realise how stupid they are, or half the world would commit suicide. Knowledge is a will-of-the-wisp, fluttering ever out of the traveller's reach; and a weary journey must be endured before it is even seen. It is only when a man knows a good deal that he discovers how unfathomable is his ignorance. The man who knows nothing is satisfied that there is nothing to know, consequently that he knows everything; and you may more easily persuade him that the moon is made of green cheese than that he is not omniscient.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“Nothing is more tedious than to talk with persons who treat your most obvious remarks as startling paradoxes and Edward suffered likewise from that passion for argument which is the bad talkers’ substitution for conversation. People who cannot talk are always proud of their dialectic. They want to modify your tritest observations and even if you suggest the day is fine, insist on arguing it out.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“Marriage is always a hopeless idiocy for a woman who has enough of her own to live upon.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“There is nothing so difficult as to persuade men that they are ignorant. Bertha, exaggerating the seriousness of the affair, thought it charlatanry to undertake a post without knowledge and without capacity. Fortunately that is not the opinion of the majority, or the government of this enlightened country could not proceed.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“With old and young great sorrow is followed by a sleepless night, and with the old great joy is as disturbing; but you, I suppose, finds happiness more natural and its rest is not disturbed by it.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“I myself stand on one side and the rest of the world on the other. There is an abyss between, that no power can cross, a strange barrier more insuperable than a mountain of fire. Husband and wife know nothing of one another. However ardent their passion, however intimate their union, they are never one; they are scarcely more to one another than strangers.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“People who live on volcanoes forget all about it; and you'd soon get used to sitting on barrels of gunpowder if you had no armchair.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“With greater knowledge came greater curiosity.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“Time dulls the most exquisite emotions and softens the most heart-rending grief;”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“She knew that she was unstable as water and variable as the summer winds.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“One struggles to know good from evil, but really they're often so very much alike.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“And the sunbeams promised life and happiness and the glory of the unknown.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“And the words thrilled Bertha like poetry.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“Women are by nature spiteful and intolerant; when you find one who exercises charity, it proves that she wants it very badly herself.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“I've learnt by long experience that people generally keep their vices to themselves, but insist on throwing their virtues in your face.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“After a Turkey carpet and dining-room table, there's nothing so comfy as a footstool. A chair always makes me feel respectable, and dull.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“Oh, you can't imagine how frightfully dull is a really good man”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“There is nothing like a knowledge of farming and an acquaintance with the habits of domestic animals to teach a man how to manage his wife.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“Well, I should like to know why you're always reading.'
'Sometimes to instruct myself; always to amuse myself.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“People say that suffering ennobles one; it's a lie, it only makes one brutal.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“I am not a worm to crawl along the ground and give thanks to the Foot that crushes me.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“I don't want to be forgiven. I've done nothing that needs it. It's God who needs m forgiveness - Not I His.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“Her emotions were always as unstable as the light winds of April”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“Celui qui aime a toujours tort”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“I make a point of thinking with the majority; it's the only way to get a reputation for wisdom.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“The elm is the most respectable of trees, over-pompous if anything, but perfectly well-bred, and the shade it casts is no ordinary shade, but solid and self-assured as befits the estate of a country family.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“Women are like chickens,' he told a friend. 'Give'em a good run, properly closed in with stout wire-netting so that they can't get into mischief, and when they cluck and cackle just sit tight and take no notice.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“a painter once had said that her skin had in it all the colours of the setting sun, of the setting sun at its borders, where the splendour mingles with the sky; it had a hundred mellow tints - cream and ivory, the palest yellow of the heart of roses and the faintest, the very faintest green, all flushed with radiant light.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“Ever since I was a young girl,' said Miss Ley, 'I've been trying not to take things seriously; and I'm afraid now I'm hopelessly frivolous.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock