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Danh ngôn của W. Somerset Maugham (Sứ mệnh: 3)

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.
Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.
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.
It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.
Writing is the supreme solace.
The crown of literature is poetry.
Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.
It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
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.
Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
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.
Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it's a mistake to make a habit out of it.
Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.
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.
Impropriety is the soul of wit.
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.
The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.
Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.
Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
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.
It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humour.
At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.