The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind.
W. Somerset MaughamRead
Thank God, I can look at a sunset now without having to think how to describe it
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses gratitude for the ability to appreciate beauty without the pressure of needing to articulate it.
W. Somerset Maugham's quote highlights the joy of simply experiencing beauty, such as a sunset, without the compulsion to analyze or describe it. It suggests that true appreciation comes from a place of personal reflection rather than the need to communicate or explain the experience to others.
Themes
SunsetAppreciationBeautyGratitudeExperience
In practice
Example use cases
A speaker at an art exhibit might use this quote to convey the importance of experiencing art beyond verbal expression.
More from W. Somerset Maugham
All quotes βCronshaw stopped for a moment to drink. He had pondered for twenty years the problem whether he loved liquor because it made him talk or whether he loved conversation because it made him thirsty.
W. Somerset MaughamRead
Are you sure you can prevent yourself from falling in love one of these days? Such things do happen, you know, even to the most prudent men.' Simon gave him a strange, one might even have thought a hostile, look. I should tear it out of my heart as I'd wrench out of my mouth a rotten tooth.
W. Somerset MaughamRead
I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
W. Somerset MaughamRead
The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willing avoids the sight of distress.
W. Somerset MaughamRead
There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth of the valley.
W. Somerset MaughamRead
Similar quotes
Whether one show one's self a man of genius in science or compose a song, the only point is, whether the thought, the discovery, the deed, is living and can live on.
Johann Wolfgang Von GoetheRead
If a given combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea or feeling I attach to it.
Charles BaudelaireRead
Writing stories is my way of scratching that itch: my escape from the claustrophobia of individuality. It lets me, at least for a while, live more than one life, walk more than one path. Reading, of course, can do the same.
Emma DonoghueRead
When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.
Ray BradburyRead
Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions.
Hayao MiyazakiRead
Poetry and prayer are very similar.
Carol Ann DuffyRead