Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

W. Somerset Maugham, fully William Somerset Maugham

English Playwright, Novelist and Short Story Writer

"The greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection... If I lead the life I've planned for myself it may effect others: the effect may be no greater than the ripple caused by a stone thrown in a pond, but one ripple causes another, and that one a third: it's just possible that a few peoplel will see that my way of life offers happiness and peace, and that they in turn will teach what they have learnt to others."

"You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches them tolerance."

"Art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach men humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action."

"Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul."

"Culture is not just an ornament; it is the expression of a nation's character, and at the same time it is a powerful instrument to mold character. The end of culture is right living."

"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."

"Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it."

"The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people cruel and bitter."

"The normal is what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to find them all in a single man is hardly to be expected."

"The life force is vigorous. The delight that accompanies it counter-balances all the pains and hardships that confront men. It makes life worth living."

"The unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones."

"The passing moment is all we can be sure of; it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it; the future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now."

"There's no one so transparent as the person who thinks he's devilish deep."

"The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account."

"To do each day two things one dislikes is a precept I have followed scrupulously: Every day I have got up and I have gone to bed."

"Unless love is passion, it's not love, but something else; and passion thrives not on satisfaction but on impediment."

"We are all greater than we know and that wisdom is the means to freedom... Work done with no selfish interest purifies the mind and that duties are opportunites afforded to man to sink his separate self and become one with the universal self."

"To the artist the communication he offers is a by-product."

"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom."

"Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young."

"Life is too short to do anything for oneself that one can pay others to do for one."

"She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit."

"The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self complacent is erroneous--on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel."

"It is bad enough to know the past; it would be intolerable to know the future."

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

"From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wise than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture."

"There are few minds in a century that can look upon a new idea without terror. Fortunately for the rest of us, there are very few new ideas about."

"Only a mediocre person is always at his best."

"The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency."

"Social distinctions in the final analysis depend upon money. The great English lords of the eighteenth century were not treated by their inferiors with the obsequiousness which not turns our stomachs because of their titles, but because of their wealth, which, with the influence it gave them, enabled them to grant favors to their friends and dependents."

"The value of culture is its effect on character. It avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens that. Its use is for life. Its aim is not beauty but goodness."

"There is no reason for life and life has no meaning."

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

"A god that can be understood is not a god."

"A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?"

"A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there's only one way to do that, he must also fool himself."

"A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute."

"A good style should show no sign of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident."

"A little common sense, a little tolerance, a little sense of humor and you will find that you feel very comfortable on this planet."

"A man thinks it quite natural that he should fall out of love with a woman, but it never strikes him for a moment that a woman can do anything so unnatural as to fall out of love with him."

"A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country."

"A little smoke lost in the air that was the life of a man."

"A man ought to work. That's what he's here for. That's how he contributes to the welfare of the community."

"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."

"A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life."

"A man?s work reveals him. In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, and you can only gain a true knowledge of him by inferences from little actions, of which he is unconscious, and from fleeting expressions, which cross his face unknown to him. Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem. But in his book or his picture the real man delivers himself defenseless. His pretentiousness will only expose his vacuity. The lathe painted to look like iron is seen to be but a lathe. No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind. To the acute observer no one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of the soul."

"A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden."

"A pleasure is none the less a pleasure because it does not last forever."

"A sensible person does not read a novel as a task. He reads it as a diversion. He is prepared to interest himself in the characters and is concerned to see how they act in given circumstances, and what happens to them; he sympathizes with their troubles and is gladdened by their joys; he puts himself in their place and, to an extent, lives their lives. Their view of life, their attitude to the great subjects of human speculation, whether stated in words or shown in action, call forth in him a reaction of surprise, of pleasure or of indignation. But he knows instinctively where his interest lies and he follows it as surely as a hound follows the scent of a fox. Sometimes, through the author's failure, he loses the scent. Then he flounders about till he finds it again. He skips."

"A thing that had always struck her about the child was that he seemed so collected. She had never seen him cry. And now she realized that his calmness was some instinctive shame of showing his feelings; he hid himself to weep."