W. Somerset Maugham on Life

"How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and you were my whole life. It is not very pleasant to realize that to you it was only an episode."

"You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency."

"One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her."

"Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens."

"She was making money. But she could not get over the idea that to earn her living was somewhat undignified, and she was inclined to remind you that she was a lady by birth."

"I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me."

"Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved."

"Of course it was cause and effect, but in the necessity with which follows the other lay all tragedy of life."

"... habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous."

"Now it is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it..."

"Art... is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life."

"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."

"Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure."

"There is no object to life. To nature nothing matters but the continuation of the species."

"Tahiti is very far away, and I knew that I should never see it again. A chapter of my life was closed, and I felt a little nearer to inevitable death."

"It was not till quite late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say: "I don't know."

"We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us."

"I reflected, while I chatted with the woman I had been asked to ‘take in’, that civilized man practises a strange ingenuity in wasting on tedious exercises the brief span of his life."

"It may be that if I lead the life I've planned for myself it may affect others; the effect may be no greater than the ripple caused by a stone thrown in a pond, but one ripple causes another."

"Men seek but one thing in life — their pleasure."

"Life isn't long enough for love and art."

"It was like one of those comedies where the sets are good and the clothes pretty, where the dialogue is clever and the acting competent, so that you pass an agreeable evening, but a week later cannot remember a thing about it."

"One of the falsest of proverbs is that you must lie on the bed that you have made. The experience of life shows that people are constantly doing things which must lead to disaster, and yet by some chance manage to evade the result of their folly."

"By the time I was twenty-four I had constructed a complete system of philosophy. It rested on two principles: The Relativity of Things and The Circumferentiality of Man. I have since discovered that the first was not a very original discovery. It may be that the other was profound, but though I have racked my brains I cannot for the life of me remember what it was."