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Quotes from Of Human Bondage — W. Somerset Maugham

1874–1965 England

← All quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

26 quotes

You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

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

Of Human Bondage (1915)

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

Men seek but one thing in life — their pleasure.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

Of course it was cause and effect, but in the necessity with which follows the other lay all tragedy of life.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

Art... is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

Attribution

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