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.

— W. Somerset Maugham

Act so that every action of yours should be capable of becoming a universal rule of action for all men.

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

A man's work reveals him. In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, but in his book or his picture the real man delivers himself defenceless. No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind. No one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.

— W. Somerset Maugham

American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham

And if I am not mistaken here is the secret of the greatness that was Spain. In Spain, it is men that are the poems, the pictures and the buildings. Men are its philosophies. They lived, these Spaniards of the Golden Age; they felt and did; they did not think. Life was what they sought and found, life in its turmoil, its fervor and its variety. Passion was the seed that brought them forth and passion was the flower they bore. But passion alone cannot give rise to a great art. In the arts the Spaniards invented nothing. They did little in any of those they practiced, but give a local color to a virtuosity they borrowed from abroad. Their literature, as I have ventured to remark, was not of the highest rank; they were taught to paint by foreign masters, but, inapt pupils, gave birth to one painter only of the very first class; they owed their architecture to the Moors, the French and the Italians, and the works themselves produced were best when they departed least from their patterns. Their preeminence was great, but it lay in another direction: it was a preeminence of character. In this I think they have been surpassed by none and equalled only by the ancient Romans. It looks as though all the energy, all the originality, of this vigorous race had been disposed to one end and one end only, the creation of man. It is not in art that they excelled, they excelled in what is greater than art--in man. But it is thought that has the last word.

— W. Somerset Maugham

And the poor lady, so small in her black satin, shrivelled up and sallow, with her funny corkscrew curls, took the little boy on her lap and put her arms around him and wept as though her heart would break. But her tears were partly tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them was gone. She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer.

— W. Somerset Maugham

Any nation that thinks more of its ease and comfort than its freedom will soon lose its freedom and the ironical thing about it is that it will lose its ease and comfort too.

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— W. Somerset Maugham