I do not want to spend too long a time with boring people, but then I do not want to spend too long a time with amusing ones. I find social intercourse fatiguing. Most persons, I think, are both exhilarated and rested by conversation; to me it has always been an effort. When I was […]
William Somerset Maugham Quotes
I don’t think you want too much sincerity in society. It would be like an iron girder in a house of cards.
Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs.
When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
Poets as we know have always made a great use of alliteration. They are persuaded that the repetition of a sound give an effect of beauty. I do not think it does in prose. It seems to me that in prose alliteration should be used only for a special reason; when used by accident it […]
A pleasure is none the less a pleasure because it does not last forever.
When you choose your friends, don’t be short-changed by choosing personality over character.
Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life’s ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.
I’ve always been interested in people, but I’ve never liked them.
My parents died when I was so young, my mother when I was eight, my father when I was ten, that I know little of them but from hearsay. . . He was forty when he married my mother, who was more than twenty years younger. She was a very beautiful woman and he was […]
