William Maugham Quotes

"Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother"

"We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person."

"It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set"

"For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life."

"Genius is talent provided with ideals."

"The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love."

"Love is only the dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species."

"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded."

"Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams"

"It's no good crying over spilt milk, because all the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it"

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

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

"People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise."

"What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories"

"Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long."

"You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences"

"It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer."

"The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety."

"The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now."

"Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable."