William Maugham Quotes (31 Quotes)

A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there's only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.

It's no good crying over spilt milk, because all the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it

It takes two to make a love affair and a man's meat is too often a woman's poison

Men are passionate, men are weak, men are stupid, men are pitiful to bring to bear on them anything so tremendous as the wrath of God seems strangely inept

The degree of a nation's civilization is marked by its disregard for the necessities of existence.

Women's hearts are like old china, none the worse for a break or two

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

No man in his heart is quite so cynical as a well-bred woman

A woman may be as wicked as she likes, but if she isn't pretty it won't do her much good

If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be so grossly over-populated as it is now

In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do

Words have weight, sound and appearance it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.

I don't know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God

The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes.

For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.

The well-dressed man is he whose clothes you never notice

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

I wonder how anyone can have the face to condemn others when he reflects upon his own thoughts

I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice.

Sentimentality is only sentiment that rubs you up the wrong way

When people say they do not care what others think of them, for the most part they deceive themselves. Generally they mean only that they will do as they choose, in the confidence that no one will know their vagaries and at the utmost only that they are willing to act contrary to the opinion of the majorities because they are supported by the approval of their neighbors. Its not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.

Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.

A pleasure is none the less a pleasure because it does not last forever

Beauty is a bit of a bore.

To eat well in England, you should have a breakfast three times a day.

A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.

It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated

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

The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.

The value of art is not beauty, but right action.