W. Somerset Maugham Quotes About Perfection

Quotes about: Perfection

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

  W. Somerset Maugham

  People, Perfection, Sometimes

  W. Somerset Maugham (2013). “The Essential W. Somerset Maugham Collection”, p.1397, eBookIt.com

• Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Perfection, Dull, Irony

  W. Somerset Maugham (1954). “Mr. Maugham Himself”

• Refecting on the high divorce rate in America as contrasted with England "American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Husband, Divorce, America

• You Europeans know nothing about America. Because we amass large fortunes you think we care for nothing but money. We are nothing for it; the moment we have it we spend it, sometimes well, sometimes ill, but we spend it. Money is nothing to us; it's merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that we've set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Men, Thinking, America

• The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Funny, Reflection, People

• I happen to think we’ve set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Men, Thinking, Self

• It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Creativity, Perfection, Creative

• Perfect is determined in shortened measures of time, not over long periods of time or lifetimes. It would be unnatural.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Long, Perfect, Would Be

• Perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Humility, Perfection, Dull

  W. Somerset Maugham (1954). “Mr. Maugham Himself”

• The ballet. I saw in the fugitive beauty of a dancer's gesture a symbol of life. It was achieved at the cost of unending effort but, with all the forces of gravity against it, a fleeting poise in mid-air, a lovely attitude worthy to be made immortal in a bas-relief, it was lost as soon as it was gained and there remained no more than the memory of an exquisite emotion. So life, lived variously and largely, becomes a work of art only when brought to its beautiful conclusion and is reduced to nothingness in the moment when it arrives at perfection.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Beautiful, Dance, Art

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