W. Somerset Maugham/Quotes

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

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.

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

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

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

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.

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

People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.

Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.

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

I like the rain because it refreshing after a hot, humid day down here.

Only nature is blind to exception unlike man and politicians

Context from : "Of Human Bondage"

Chapter CVI

Philip asked himself desperately what was the use of living at all. It all seemed inane. It was the same with Cronshaw: it was quite unimportant that he had lived; he was dead and forgotten, his book of poems sold in remainder by second-hand booksellers; his life seemed to have served nothing except to give a pushing journalist occasion to write an article in a review. And Philip cried out in his soul:

"What is the use of it?"

The effort was so incommensurate with the result. The bright hopes of youth had to be paid for at such a bitter price of disillusionment. Pain and disease and unhappiness weighed down the scale so heavily. What did it all mean? He thought of his own life, the high hopes with which he had entered upon it, the limitations which his body forced upon him, his friendlessness, and the lack of affection which had surrounded his youth. He did not know that he had ever done anything but what seemed best to do, and what a cropper he had come! Other men, with no more advantages than he, succeeded, and others again, with many more, failed. It seemed pure chance. The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.

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