W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

It must be quite rare for an interviewer to be interviewed.

Think about how stupid the average person is and then realize that half of them are stupider than that.

I'm an absolutely normal guy.

A lucky man is rarer than a white crow.

The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.

A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world - intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man.

There is thus a certain plausibility to Nietzsche's doctrine, though it is dynamite. He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee.

I claim to be no more than an average man with below average capabilities.

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.

Education is worth a whole lot. Just think - with enough education and brains the average man would make a good lawyer - and so would the average lawyer.

In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character.

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. ...And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.

Take the life-lie away from the average man and straight away you take away his happiness.

I don't come to Toronto often, so when I'm there it's always special and rare which I think makes it very exciting for my fans.

Only in very recent times has the average man been a source of savings.

She knew how to trust people... a rare quality, revealing a character far above average.

One of the main weaknesses of mankind is the average man's familiarity with the word 'impossible.

It's a rare thing not to have been bonny-- once.

ABNORMAL, adj. Not conforming to standard. In matters of thought and conduct, to be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested. Wherefore the lexicographer adviseth a striving toward the straiter [sic] resemblance of the Average Man than he hath to himself. Whoso attaineth thereto shall have peace, the prospect of death and the hope of Hell.

Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.

Another British study discovered that average eight-year-olds were better able to identify characters from the Japanese card trading game Pokemon than native species in the community where they lived: Pikachu, Metapod, and Wigglytuff were names more familiar to them than otter, beetle, and oak tree.

In the popular arena, one can tell ... that the average man ... imagines that an industrious acquisition of particulars will render him a man of knowledge. With what pathetic trust does he recite his facts! He has been told that knowledge is power, and knowledge consists of a great many small things.

It shames the average man to be valued below his own estimate of his worth.

Our party's most outstanding mediocrity.

The masses do not like those who surpass them in any regard. The average man envies and hates those who are different.