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"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life."
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"As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too."

"We encounter great souls by reading great books."

"There is no other enjoyment like reading."

"What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?"

"A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading."

"Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce...As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium."
Explore more quotes by W. Somerset Maugham


"Act so that every action of yours should be capable of becoming an universal rule of action for all men."


"I do not believe that I am a vindictive man, but when the immortal gods take a hand in the matter it is pardonable to observe the results with complacency."


"It was like making a blunder at a party; there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it."


"My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror."


"It looked as though you did not act in a certain way because you thought in a certain way, but rather you thought in a certain way because you were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing to do with it."


"An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones."
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