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Quotes from The Moon and Sixpence — W. Somerset Maugham

1874–1965 England

← All quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

27 quotes

It was a night so beautiful that your soul seemed hardly able to bear the prison of the body.

The Moon and Sixpence (1919)

I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere, how much baseness in the noble, or how much goodness in the reprobate.

The Moon and Sixpence (1919)

The poignancy which all beauty has.

The Moon and Sixpence (1919)

She was making money. But she could not get over the idea that to earn her living was somewhat undignified, and she was inclined to remind you that she was a lady by birth.

The Moon and Sixpence (1919)

I reflected, while I chatted with the woman I had been asked to ‘take in’, that civilized man practises a strange ingenuity in wasting on tedious exercises the brief span of his life.

The Moon and Sixpence (1919)

One of the falsest of proverbs is that you must lie on the bed that you have made. The experience of life shows that people are constantly doing things which must lead to disaster, and yet by some chance manage to evade the result of their folly.

The Moon and Sixpence (1919)

I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul's good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed.

The Moon and Sixpence (1919)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: W. Somerset Maugham (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.