W. Somerset Maugham

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

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”

“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.”

“Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.”

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

“Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.”

“Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.”

“Only a mediocre person is always at his best.”

“Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.”

“It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.”

“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.”

“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.”

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

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

“Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.”

“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.”

“At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.”

“Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.”

“When you're twenty you care what everyone thinks, when you're forty you don't care what anyone thinks, and when you're sixty you realize no one was thinking about you at all.”

“It is a general rule of human nature that people despise those who treat them well, and look up to those who make no concessions.”