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Mrs Craddock

W. Somerset Maugham

Top 10 Best Quotes

“The most difficult thing for a wise woman to do is to pretend to be a foolish one.”

“Happily men don't realise how stupid they are, or half the world would commit suicide. Knowledge is a will-of-the-wisp, fluttering ever out of the traveller's reach; and a weary journey must be endured before it is even seen. It is only when a man knows a good deal that he discovers how unfathomable is his ignorance. The man who knows nothing is satisfied that there is nothing to know, consequently that he knows everything; and you may more easily persuade him that the moon is made of green cheese than that he is not omniscient.”

“With old and young great sorrow is followed by a sleepless night, and with the old great joy is as disturbing; but you, I suppose, finds happiness more natural and its rest is not disturbed by it.”

“There is nothing so difficult as to persuade men that they are ignorant. Bertha, exaggerating the seriousness of the affair, thought it charlatanry to undertake a post without knowledge and without capacity. Fortunately that is not the opinion of the majority, or the government of this enlightened country could not proceed.”

“Nothing is more tedious than to talk with persons who treat your most obvious remarks as startling paradoxes and Edward suffered likewise from that passion for argument which is the bad talkers’ substitution for conversation. People who cannot talk are always proud of their dialectic. They want to modify your tritest observations and even if you suggest the day is fine, insist on arguing it out.”

“Marriage is always a hopeless idiocy for a woman who has enough of her own to live upon.”

“I myself stand on one side and the rest of the world on the other. There is an abyss between, that no power can cross, a strange barrier more insuperable than a mountain of fire. Husband and wife know nothing of one another. However ardent their passion, however intimate their union, they are never one; they are scarcely more to one another than strangers.”

“ten years of East Anglian winds had blown all the softness out of her face, and their bitter fury seemed to have bleached even her hair.”

“one's great duty in this world is to leave people alone”

“a painter once had said that her skin had in it all the colours of the setting sun, of the setting sun at its borders, where the splendour mingles with the sky; it had a hundred mellow tints - cream and ivory, the palest yellow of the heart of roses and the faintest, the very faintest green, all flushed with radiant light.”

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Book Keywords:

paradoxes, women, human-behavior, english-literature, art-of-conversation, dialectic, argumentative, psychology, irony, husband-and-wife, maugham, insightful-quote, abyss

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