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"You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism."
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"Macy: "In Truth, I said, "there are no rules other than you have to tell the truth.Wes: "How do you win? he askedMacy: "That, I said, "is such a boy question."

"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."

"A false potential can dress itself up as attractive ideas."

"Truth does not sit in a cave and hide like a lie. It wanders around proudly and roars loudly like a lion."

"The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true."

"Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are."

"When I was a child, I thought grown-ups and teachers knew the truth, because they told me they did. It took years for me to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught me, and to start doing all the things they'd told me NOT to do. Their main pitch was that achievement equaled happiness, when all you had to do was study rock stars, or movie stars, or them, to see that they were mostly miserable. They were all running around in mazes like everyone else."

"The only sentence that begins with 'I' that's true of me is I'm full of shit."
Explore more quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

"It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive."

"When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself?"

"Supposing there is no life everlasting. Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They've given up all for nothing. They've been cheated. They're dupes."Waddington reflected for a little while. "I wonder if it matters what they have aimed at is illusion. Their lives are in themselves beautiful. I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books the write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art."

"The passing moment is all we can be sure of it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it."

"I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do."

"I have always hesitated to give advice, for how can one advise another how to act unless one knows that other as well as one knows himself? Heaven knows. I know little enough of myself: I know nothing of others. We can only guess at the thoughts and emotions of our neighbours. Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower and he communicates with the other prisoners, who form mankind, by conventional signs that have not quite the same meaning for them as for himself."

"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."

"She alone had been blind to his merit. Why? Because he loved her and she did not love him. What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?"
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