W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.

Life can seem rather unreal at times. Alive and well and loving one day. No longer there the next.

A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it.

The world's a bubble, and the life of man, Less than a span.

Letting go all else, cling to the following few truths. Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant: all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. This mortal life is a little thing, lived in a little corner of the earth; and little, too, is the longest fame to come - dependent as it is on a succession of fast-perishing little men who have no knowledge even of their own selves, much less of one long dead and gone.

I feel like my body is borrowed and this life is very temporary.

No one loses any other life than the one he now lives, nor does one live any other life than that which he will lose.

Dead things show you what you’ll be too one day.

The mayfly lives only one day. And sometimes it rains.

The plain truth is we are going to die. Here I am, a teeny spec surrounded by boundless space and time, arguing with the whole of creation, shaking my fist, sputtering, growing even eloquent at times, and then-poof! I am gone. Swept off once and for all. I think that is very, very funny.

Some men spend their whole life furnishing for themselves the things proper to life without realizing that at our birth each of us was poured a mortal brew to drink.

Life is but sighs; and, when they cease, 'tis over.

There came to him an image of man’s whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man’s life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man’s grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of all-engulfing night.

Life is short and we have scarcely begun to live when we are called to die.

Isn't it strange how we move out lives for another day? Like skipping a beat, what if a great wave should wash us all away?

The greatest surprise in life to me is the brevity of life.

So passed the seasons then, so they pass now, and so they will pass in time to come, while we come and go like leaves of the tree that fall and are soon forgotten.

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

... nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment - maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.

Look what a little vain dust we are!

One day you will disappear on a funeral pyre - just into nothingness, as smoke.

Anybody can die, everything is fleeting, and you've just got to make sure that you catch up on what you can catch up on.

All things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusion; life is warfare, and a visit to a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion.

Life is only precious because it ends, kid.