| A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Writing] |
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| The best style is the style you don't notice. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Writing] |
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| There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Random] |
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| The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Poetry] |
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| A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Marriage] |
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| I've met so many people, often the scum of the earth, and found them, you know, quite decent. I am an uncomfortable stranger to moral indignation. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [People] |
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| My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Homosexuality] |
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| Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Future] |
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| To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Books] |
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| You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Integrity] |
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| Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives... by make-believe. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Truth] |
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| If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Money] |
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| There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood. . . . Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Money] |
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| Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Death] |
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| Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Love] |
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| The important thing was to love rather than to be loved. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Love] |
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| There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Love] |
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| 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. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Love] |
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| Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Life] |
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| The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit. |
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- William Somerset Maugham |
more quotations on [Quotations] |
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