Love Quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

90 Love quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

All Love quotes W. Somerset Maugham’s page

Maugham’s lines paint love as a natural trick that can become a prison. He notes that men often see love as simple while women may find it unnatural. The quotes also hint at love’s harsh side, where tenderness is missing and cruelty can arise.

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What mean and cruel things men can do for the love of God.

W. Somerset Maugham

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A good rule for writers: do not explain overmuch.

W. Somerset Maugham

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The end of culture is right living

W. Somerset Maugham

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When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.

W. Somerset Maugham

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“Poor slut, I think she loves me,' said Gray, his eyes closed.”

W. Somerset Maugham

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The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.

W. Somerset Maugham

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No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.

W. Somerset Maugham

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The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.

W. Somerset Maugham

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“No one ever died of love yet," said the prioress with a savage bitterness.”

W. Somerset Maugham

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One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her.

W. Somerset Maugham

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As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.

W. Somerset Maugham

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By the time an actor knows how to act any sort of part he is often too old to act any but…

W. Somerset Maugham

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“I never expected you to love me, I didn't see any reason that you should, I never thought myself very lovable.”

W. Somerset Maugham

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

W. Somerset Maugham

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“I don't ask you to forgive me. I don't ask you to love me as you used to love me. But couldn't…

W. Somerset Maugham

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“Nature has neither love nor hate, and with indifference smiles upon the light at heart and to the heavy brings a deeper…

W. Somerset Maugham

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Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it's the whole…

W. Somerset Maugham

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“If I have succeeded at all in giving the complicated impression that Strickland made on me, it will not seem outrageous to…

W. Somerset Maugham

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“Oh, my dear, it's rather hard to take quite literally the things a man says when he's in love with you." "Didn't…

W. Somerset Maugham

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The nature of men and women - their essential nature - is so vile and despicable that if you were to portray…

W. Somerset Maugham

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Her tears were partly tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them was gone. She loved him now with…

W. Somerset Maugham

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With the superciliousness of extreme youth, I put thirty-five as the utmost limit at which a man might fall in love without…

W. Somerset Maugham

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“No pain in love is so hard to bear as that which comes from the impossibility of doing any service from the…

W. Somerset Maugham

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She had no mercy. He looked at her neck and thought how he would like to jab it with the knife he…

W. Somerset Maugham

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“He had thought of love as a rapture which seized one so that all the world seemed spring-like, he had looked forward…

W. Somerset Maugham

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I think I was a little disappointed in her. I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do…

W. Somerset Maugham

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This love was a torment, and he resented bitterly the subjugation in which it held him; he was a prisoner and he…

W. Somerset Maugham

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Yet magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love and imagination are…

W. Somerset Maugham

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He knew that all things human are transitory and therefore that it must cease one day or another. He looked forward to…

W. Somerset Maugham

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“And the poor lady, so small in her black satin, shrivelled up and sallow, with her funny corkscrew curls, took the little…

W. Somerset Maugham

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The tragedy of love is not death or separation. How long do you think it would have been before one or other…

W. Somerset Maugham

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Are you sure you can prevent yourself from falling in love one of these days? Such things do happen, you know, even…

W. Somerset Maugham

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“They're a funny lot, suicides. I remember one man who couldn't get any work to do and his wife died, so he…

W. Somerset Maugham

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“I adore good food as I adore all the other pleasant things of life, and because I have that gift I am…

W. Somerset Maugham

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“There are psychologists who think that consciousness accompanies brain processes and is determined by them but doesn't itself exert any influence on…

W. Somerset Maugham

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“In love one should exercise economy of intercourse. None of us can love for ever. Love will be stronger and will last…

W. Somerset Maugham

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“I hate you. I wish you was dead." Mrs. Carey gasped. He said the words so savagely that it gave her quite…

W. Somerset Maugham

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“How strange was the relation between parents and children! When they were small the parents doted on them, passed through agonies of…

W. Somerset Maugham

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“I do not suppose she had ever really cared for her husband, and what I had taken for love was no more…

W. Somerset Maugham

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“I do not know what infinite yearning possesses you, so that you are driven to a perilous, lonely search for some goal…

W. Somerset Maugham

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More by W. Somerset Maugham

“A man thinks it quite natural that he should fall out of love with a woman, but it never strikes him for a moment…

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…

W. Somerset Maugham

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

W. Somerset Maugham

The world is hard and cruel. We are here none knows why, and we go none knows whither. We must be very humble. We…

W. Somerset Maugham

“There is no more merit in having read a thousand books than in having ploughed a thousand fields.”

W. Somerset Maugham

“I wanted to live again and again. I was willing to accept every sort of life, no matter what its pain and sorrow; I…

W. Somerset Maugham

In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally.

W. Somerset Maugham

Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.

W. Somerset Maugham

“His love became a prison from which he longed to escape, but he had not the strength merely to open the door-that was all…

W. Somerset Maugham

I did not believe him capable of love. That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness…

W. Somerset Maugham

If only the good were a little less heavy-footed

W. Somerset Maugham

Perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull.

W. Somerset Maugham

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

W. Somerset Maugham

“My dear, you used to be quite a dish; now you're quite a tureen.”

W. Somerset Maugham

“When people say they do not care what others thing of them, for the most part they deceive themselves”

W. Somerset Maugham