W. Somerset Maugham

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

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 has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.