Quotes from William Somerset Maugham

Genius is talent provided with ideals.

The crown of literature is poetry.

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

There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.

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

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

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.

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.

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

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.

Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.

Nobody's free until everybody's free.

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.

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

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

Love is only the dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.

Love is what happens to a man and woman who don't know each other

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

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