"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."

W. Somerset Maugham Literature See all quotes by W. Somerset Maugham →

React to this quote

More by W. Somerset Maugham

“After all, 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.”

“I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.”

“He was the kind of man with whom one would have hesitated to pass a lonely evening, but with whom one might cheerfully have looked forward to spending six months.”

“Conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.”

“You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance, and the humorist, with a smile and perhaps a sigh, is more likely to shrug his shoulders than to condemn.”

“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.”

Resonant Thoughts

"The COVID-19 outbreak is yet another demonstration of how the Indian poor are systematically excluded from the government’s policy-making. A case in point is the government’s failure to account for th…"

— Armin Rosencranz

Education1937

#family

"Maybe, he thought, there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends — maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they'…"

— Stephen King

Literature1986

#life

"The orator resumes: "And if it should happen some day that a man, having in his hand the five hundred thousand officeholders who constitute the government, and the four hundred thousand soldiers compo…"

— Victor Hugo

Literature1802–1885

#life

"it is always a genial laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No man who can laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at these things. It is some poor character only desiring to l…"

— Thomas Carlyle

Philosophy1795–1881

#humor