W. Somerset Maugham
38 quotations
Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
It's a funny thing about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
There are two good things in life -- freedom of thought and freedom of action.
We know our friends by their defects rather than their merits.
The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.
It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humor.
You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.
Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.
Love is what happens to a man and woman who don't know each other.
The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willing avoids the sight of distress.
Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.
Perfection has one grave defect. It is apt to be dull.
Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.
It is unfair to expect a politician to live in private up to the statements he makes in public.
The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.
We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
Sentimentality is the only sentiment that rubs you the wrong way.
The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.
I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.