W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced--even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.

We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.

I'm a pretty young person, but I think you need a little life experience to actually say something.

Things of which there is sight, hearing, apprehension, these I prefer.

To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.

What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable.

I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what is was all about.

I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil.

Not having heard something is not as good as having heard it; having heard it is not as good as having seen it; having seen it is not as good as knowing it; knowing it is not as good as putting it into practice.

As you get older and you realize you really don't know as much as you think you know, you listen more. Because then you think, now I need to be more receptive to the things I don't know. That's how you learn.

Experience teaches us, but we scarcely know what.

If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that's what we mean by thinking!

Once turn to practice, error and truth will no longer consort together.

By bringing together what we know and what we don't know through analogy, metaphorical thinking strikes the spark that ignites discovery.

Knowing it and seeing it are two different things.

To Truth's house there is a single door, which is experience.

I travel because I want to know. Books and documentaries will only get you so far. If you want to know, you will have to go.

We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.

True knowledge without xperience is food without sustenance

We need both information and thinking. Information is no substitute for thinking and thinking is no substitute for information.

He who walks may see and understand. You can study all America from one hilltop, if your eyes are open and your mind is willing to reach. But first you must walk to that hill.

We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.

Sometimes you can't know until you know.

What are stories for if we don't learn from them?

Some people would say you need what you need to work, but I need very little to work, because I learned how to make movies on tiny movies. It's all kind of easy for me.