It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he should do and never by what he wanted with his whole soul to do. […] He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slopped through his fingers. His ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories. . W. Somerset Maugham
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  2. Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another. - Thomas Merton

  3. But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves. - Mikhail Bulgakov

  4. ...some things are better left in the past. And true things are destined to repeat themselves. - Suzanne Young

  5. She had to go on this quest. The fate of the world might depend on it. But part of him wanted to say: Forget the world. He didn’t want to be without her. - Rick Riordan

More Quotes By W. Somerset Maugham
  1. It seemed to him that there was a scarlet thread running through the fabric of life, one that joined events across the years, piercing human hearts and plunging underground, only to reemerge without warning, a thread connecting lives and sometimes dates.

  2. Everywhere he went he saw this same phenomenon–parents unmindful of their children, their attention fixed on little glass windows in the palms of their hands, mesmerized like drug addicts, longing for some artificial connection while their own flesh and blood careened wildly through a chaotic...

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