One of the defects of my character is that I can never grow used to the plainness of people; however sweet a disposition a friend of mine may have, years of intimacy can never reconcile me to his bad teeth or lopsided nose: on the other hand I never cease to delight in his comeliness and after twenty years of familiarity I am stil able to take pleasure in a well-shaped brow or the delicate line of a cheekbone.
“You know, at one time I made quite a little reputation for myself as a humorist by the simple process of telling the truth. It came as such a surprise to most people that they thought I was being funny.”
“Well, Larry is, I think, the only person I’ve ever met who’s completely disinterested. It makes his actions seem peculiar. We’re not used to persons who do things simply for the love of God whom they don’t believe in.”
Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.
“I found I was able to relieve people not only of pain but of fear. It’s strange how many people suffer from it. I don’t only mean fear of closed spaces and fear of heights, but fear of death and what’s worse, fear of life. Often they’re people who seem in the best of health, prosperous, without any worry, and yet they’re tortured by it.”
“I’d known bad men in Paris and when I got back to Chicago I knew more, but for the most part their badness was due to heredity, which they couldn’t help, or to their environment, which they didn’t choose: I’m not sure that society wasn’t more responsible for their crimes than they were.”
“No,’ he answered. ‘You are a deeply religious man who doesn’t believe in God. God will seek you out. You’ll come back. Whether here or elsewhere only God can tell.’”
“I’ve always felt that there was something pathetic in the founders of religion who made it a condition of salvation that you should believe in them. It’s as though they needed your faith to have faith in themselves. They remind you of those old pagan gods who grew wan and faint if they were not sustained by the burnt offerings of the devout.”
But why should we of the West, we Americans especially, be daunted by decay and death, hunger and thirst, sickness, old age, grief and delusion?
“The best to be said for it is that when you’ve come to the conclusion that something is inevitable all you can do is to make the best of it.”
“That is just what the Indians maintain that we in the West haven’t done. They think that we with our countless inventions, with our factories and machines and all they produce, have sought happiness in material things, but that happiness rests not in them, but in spiritual things. And they think the way we have chosen leads to destruction.”
“I like manual labour. Whenever I’ve got waterlogged with study I’ve taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating. I remember reading a biography of Spinoza and thinking how silly the author was to look upon it as a terrible hardship that in order to earn his scanty living Spinoza had to polish lenses. I’m sure it was a help to his intellectual activity, if only because it diverted his attention for a while from the hard work of speculation. My mind is free when I’m washing a car or tinkering with a carburetor and when the job’s done I have the pleasant sensation of having accomplished something.”
(All text from The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham, first published January 1, 1944 by The Blakiston Company)
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