21 quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

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As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

Literature

156 reads

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Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.

Civilisation

4.1 · 34 votes · 148 reads

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Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.

Fiction

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How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

Pettiness

3.2 · 42 votes · 162 reads

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How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

Literature

4.0 · 51 votes

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W. Somerset Maugham

Countries
I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh
4.7 · 7 votes · 200 reads
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Defects
If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.
4.1 · 14 votes · 184 reads
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Art and Culture
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
4.4 · 38 votes · 71 reads
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Thought and Reason
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
4.6 · 21 votes · 74 reads
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Thought and Reason
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
4.3 · 32 votes · 72 reads
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Time
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
4.5 · 29 votes · 162 reads
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Various
Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
3.7 · 26 votes · 18 reads
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Time
The genuine artist is never ''true to life.'' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
3.8 · 19 votes · 93 reads
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Virtues
The imagination is man's power over nature.
4.6 · 44 votes · 169 reads
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Thought and Reason
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
4.4 · 7 votes · 173 reads
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Art and Culture
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
5.0 · 46 votes · 108 reads
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Art and Culture
They said, ''You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, ''Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.''
4.0 · 51 votes · 159 reads
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Time
To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) -but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in
3.3 · 58 votes · 97 reads
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Virtues
To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.
3.7 · 50 votes · 185 reads
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Defects
Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
3.3 · 51 votes · 6 reads
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Time
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
3.3 · 28 votes · 29 reads
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