W. Somerset Maugham

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

Dinner a time when . . . one should eat wisely but not too well and talk well but not too wisely.

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.

I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.

A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her . . . but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.

Beauty is an ecstacy it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.

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

Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

I have great affection for you, Roy" I answered, "but I don't think you are the sort of person I'd care to have breakfast with.

She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her.

I am willing to take life as a game of chess in which the first rules are not open to discussion. No one asks why the knight is allowed his eccentric hop, why the castle may only go straight and the bishop obliquely. These things are to be accepted, and with these rule the game must be played: it is foolish to complain of them.

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

She alone had been blind to his merit. Why? Because he loved her and she did not love him. What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?

Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour.

Himself an ugly man, insignificantof appearance, he prized very highly comeliness in others.