W. Somerset Maugham

You've been brought up like a gentleman and a Christian, and I should be false to the trust laid upon me by your dead father and mother if I allowed you to expose yourself to such temptation.'Well, I know I'm not a Christian and I'm beginning to doubt whether I'm a gentleman,' said Philip.

I used to listen to the monks repeating the Lord's Prayer; I wondered how they could continue to pray without misgiving to their heavenly father to give them their daily bread. Do children beseech their earthly father to give them sustenance? They expect him to do it, they neither feel gratitude to him for doing so nor need to, and we have only blame for a man who brings children into the world that he can't or won't provide for. It seemed to me that if an omnipotent creator was not prepared to provide for his creatures with the necessities, material and spiritual, of existence he'd have done better not to create them.

The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.

Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither.

At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.

It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.

It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.

It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.

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.

Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

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.

Impropriety is the soul of wit.

You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.

I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.