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| W. Somerset Maugham
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. American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers. An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones. Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life. D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children. Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. and my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it. Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner. He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it. I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice. I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world. I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present. I have not been afraid of excess: excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. 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. Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young. It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late. It is funny about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the very best you will very often get it. 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 was such a lovely day I thought it was a pity to get up. It wasn't until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say "I don't know." It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. Life isn't long enough for love and art. Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind. Love is only the dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species. Men seek but one thing in life – their pleasure. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Most people cannot see anything, but I can se what is in front of my nose with extreme clearness; the greatest writers can see through a brick wall. My vision is not so penetrating. People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise. She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit. Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction. Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem. The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit. The important thing was to love rather than to be loved. The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore. There are three rules to writing fiction. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror. There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed. There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved. To write simply is as difficult as to be good. We have long passed the Victorian era, when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me. When things are at their worst I find something always happens. When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully. You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches them tolerance. 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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