William Somerset Maugham

It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.

Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs.

There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.

Genius is talent provided with ideals.

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

Tolerance is another word for indifference.

When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it.

There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood. . . . Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.