top of page

"A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Sensitivity quotes

"It seems my heart is made of tissue paper, I wish the world would handle it more delicately."

"I enabled your tendency to be vulnerable and weak, and your habits of crying when 6,000 others were present for the music."

"I fear I have praised you too much too soon. Will I lose you in your shame of believing that you can never be what I think you are?"

"I feel bare. I didn't realize I wore my secrets as armor until they were gone and now everyone sees me as I really am."

"Risk is uncertainty injected into our most vulnerable places. And because that's the case, we may choose not to risk."

"Everyone has their folding-point, Miles. Their mortal vulnerability. Some just keep it in a nonstandard location."

"Unfortunately, fact checking has become a lost art."

"Tenderhearted people are silent sufferers they just learn the art to fly with broken wings."

"He said he'd never opened up to anyone... But that confiding in me, was like learning to breathe all over again. I don't know about you, but how do you turn away from that?"
Explore more quotes by W. Somerset Maugham


"I do not attachany exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life isthere to be lived rather than to be written about. My aimis to search out the manifold experience that it offers,wringing from each moment what of emotion it presents.I look upon my writing as a graceful accomplishmentwhich does not absorb but rather adds pleasure toexistence. And as for posterity-damn posterity."


"It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the sense; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes 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."


"A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute."


"If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself."


"Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour."


"If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write."


"I began to meditate upon the writer's life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world's indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit to a good grace of its hazards...But he has one compensation, Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as a theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man."


"What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?"
bottom of page