Loving Somerset Maugham

From The razor's edge:

• Love isn't a good sailor. With three thousand miles of ocean between, the pangs of love become quite tolerable. When i suffered from the pangs of unrequited love I immediately got on an ocean liner.
• American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
• The heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. When passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but convinces you that honour is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay.
• Passion is destructive. And if it doesn't destroy it dies.
• Unless love is passion, it's not love, but something else; and passion thrives not on satisfaction but on impediment.
• I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. I warmed both my hands before the fire of life
• Self-confidence is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victims to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. No wine is so intoxicating, no love so shattering, no vice so compelling.
• I couldn't believe that God wanted it (being praised to His face) either. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery.
• You're a deeply religious person who does not believe in God. God will seek you out.
• I 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.
• Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing too.