W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to.

When you're a fledgling youth-type adult, it appears that all people in their 40s look old enough to be in a painting hanging on the wall of a stately home in England. It's not until you limp into your 70s that people in their 40s look too young to vote, and college cheerleaders closely resemble Yorkshire terriers.

If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he's got nothing more, you know?

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.

Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending.

A man's character never changes radically from youth to old age. What happens is that circumstances bring out characteristics which have not been obvious to the superficial observer.

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.

I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity.

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

The father's greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

I was 24 yesterday. Suddenly you wake up, and you get on the elevator, and there's a mirror there. And you look in the mirror, and you're an old man.

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

As you get older, you come to a place in life where you can't just live in the present.

I usually say I left puberty at 58.

People always talk about how time flies; it's become sort of a colloquialism now. You don't really understand it until you reach your late 30s and early 40s - and I'm sure time will move even faster as I get older.

In your twenties, you think you are immortal. In your thirties, you hope you are immortal.

I think in your 30s you can still pretend you're in your 20s, or at least maintain some semblance of youth. Forty is when you've got to stop denying the inevitable.

[My novels] introduce levels of intelligence ... moral doubt [and] self-doubt, which may not pertain [to real-world espionage].

In middle age, I practiced feeling old, but the real thing has been a rude surprise.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.

Here's flowers for you; Hot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram; The marigold, that goes to bed wi' the sun And with him rises weeping: these are flowers Of middle summer, and I think they are given To men of middle age.