W. Somerset Maugham

“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.”

“The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.”

“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.”

“Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.”

“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.”

“It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humour.”

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

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

“If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?”

“Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.”

“Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.”

“If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There are two good things in life - freedom of thought and freedom of action.”

“When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.”

“Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it's a mistake to make a habit out of it.”

“Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.”

“It is not true that suffering ennobles the character happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.”

“A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.”

“You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.”

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

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