More from William Somerset Maugham

  1. I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world.
  2. People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.
  3. Art... is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of li…
  4. There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood...Money is like a sixth sense without which you canno…
  5. Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
  6. You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know …
  7. 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 th…
  8. It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late.

All William Somerset Maugham quotes