W Somerset Maugham Quotes

Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.

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

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

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

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

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

She’s wonderful. Tell her I’ve never seen such beautiful hands. I wonder what she sees in you.”Waddington, smiling, translated the question.“She says I’m good.”“As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue,” Kitty mocked.

It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he should do and never by what he wanted with his whole soul to do. […] He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slopped through his fingers. His ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.