W. Somerset Maugham People Quotations

Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.

I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.

People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.

Considering how foolishly people act and how pleasantly they prattle, perhaps it would be better for the world if they talked more and did less.

When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right.

If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.

The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous, on the contrary, it makes them for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel.

Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence.

I think I was a little disappointed in her. I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do now, and I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. I did not realize how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in the same human heart.

The worst of having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were acting naturally or being tactful too. [The human element]

When married people don't get on they can separate, but if they're not married it's impossible. It's a tie that only death can sever.

I never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.

People are always a little disconcerted when you don't recognize them, they are so important to themselves, it is a shock to discover of what small importance they are to others. [The human element]

You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance, and the humorist, with a smile and perhaps a sigh, is more likely to shrug his shoulders than to condemn.

Our natural egoism leads us to judge people by their relations to ourselves. We want them to be certain things to us, and for us that is what they are; because the rest of them is no good to us, we ignore it.

Almost all the people who’ve had the most effect on me I seem to have met by chance, yet looking back it seems as though I couldn’t but have met them.

The Riviera isn't only a sunny place for shady people.

Only mediocre people are at the best all the time.

Most people are such fools that it is really no great compliment to say that someone is above the average.

A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there's only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.

I've met so many people, often the scum of the earth, and found them, you know, quite decent. I am an uncomfortable stranger to moral indignation.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

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

If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be as overpopulated as it is now.

I am afraid of people with too much charm. They devour you. In the end you are made a sacrifice to the exercise of their fascinating gift and their insincerity.

If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one.

Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.

The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.