William Somerset Maugham

It's funny about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the very best you will very often get it.

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.

Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.

There is only one thing about which I am certain, and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain.

Commonsense and good nature will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult.

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives by make-believe.

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.