W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

Even ordinary people aren't ordinary, not really. They're filled up with thoughts and feelings that you might never know are there until they suddenly materialise.

People are more complicated than you give them credit for.

By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration but our reconsideration.

I feel like most people aren't either/or, they're both/and. You're both magnanimous and petty. You're both kind and cruel. You're never just one thing.

I'm a full-of-contradictions kind of guy.

Everyone is an ocean inside. Every individual walking the street. Everyone is a universe of thoughts, and insights, and feelings. But every person is crippled in his or her own way by our inability to truly present ourselves to the world.

No one always or never does anything. People don't see themselves as one-dimensional, so you shouldn't attempt to define them as such.

I'm very comfortable with myself and my sexuality, but it doesn't define me. I also read books believe it or not.

I think many people have contradictions to them and I love characters that deal with those contradictions.

You come to realize people are not simple.

Economic theory does not work with human beings. We are far too messy.

I am fascinated, I suppose, by a flawed man with a streak of greatness.

What can I say? I'm a complicated guy.

But who knows their own child? You know bits - certain predictable reactions, a handful of familiar qualities. The rest is impenetrable. And quite right too. You give birth to them. You do not design them.

I love ambiguity. People are that way. People are very hard to work out. No one is just strong or just fragile, or anything like that.

There is no accounting for human beings.

Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light; for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop.

I suppose it's too bad people can't be a little more consistent. But if they were, maybe they would stop being people.

A name can't begin to encompass the sum of all her parts. But that's the magic of names, isn't it? That the complex, contradictory individuals we are can be called up complete and whole in another mind through the simple sorcery of a name.

…on some occasions, women, like dreams, go by contraries.

The novel is a big space, and a lot can happen. Just think about the parts of your life. How do we account for our own contradictions? The only way to understand them is to let them exist, as truths that indicate something about character. People are built of elements that don't fit together - and the conflict of that is their essential drive.

Faced with a world of "modern ideas" which would like to banish everyone into a corner and a "specialty," a philosopher, if there could be a philosopher these days, would be compelled to establish the greatness of mankind, the idea of "greatness," on the basis of his own particular extensive range and multiplicity, his own totality in the midst of diversity.

Every life is complicated, every mind a kingdom of unmapped mysteries.

People are not as one-dimensional as the stories about them.

Do not underestimate the human being, who sometimes appears so simple. Even with sight as sharp as an eagle, a mind as sharp as a razor, senses more powerful than gods, hearing that can catch the music and the lamentations of life, your knowledge of humanity will never be total.