W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

I love artists. I find them fascinating. To me, there really is a genuine magic in what they do.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

Whatever you can imagine is waiting for you, fully created in the invisible, and the way to make it visible is to harness the force of love by imagining and feeling what you love.

Magic has often been thought of us the art of making dreams come true; the art of realizing visions. Yet before we can bring birth to the vision we have to see it.

He is a dull observer whose experience has not taught him the reality and force of magic, as well as of chemistry.

Let us be aware of our power to create a dream of heaven where everything is possible. Help us to use our imagination to guide the dream of our life, the magic of our creation. Today let something extraordinary happen that will change our life forever; let everything we do and say be an expression of the beauty in our heart, always based on love

I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.

Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.

What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.

What art should be about,' they will say, 'is revealing exquisite and resonant truths about the human condition.' Well, to be honest - no, it shouldn’t. I mean, it can occasionally, if it wants to; but really, how many penetrating insights to human nature do you need in one lifetime? Two? Three? Once you’ve realised that no one else has a clue what they’re doing, either, and that love can be totally pointless, any further insights into human nature just start getting depressing really.

Falling in love is the beginning of all wisdom, all sympathy, all compassion, all art, all religion; and in it's larger sense is the one thing in life worth doing.

There was romance in the unknown, but once a place had been discovered and cataloged and mapped, it was diminished, just another dusty fact in a book, sapped of mystery. So maybe it was better to leave a few spots on the map blank. To let the world keep a little of its magic, rather than forcing it to divulge every last secret. Maybe it was better, now and then, to wonder.

By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors.

What you call magic is nothing more than an act of the imagination fired by the senses, then given shape by the power of your aura.

Things are not magical because they've been conjured for us by some outside force. They are magical because we create them.

Any wizard bright enough to survive for five minutes was also bright enough to realize that if there was any power in demonology, then it lay with the demons. Using it for your own purposes would be like trying to beat mice to death with a rattlesnake.

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.

She was chosen,' Mae insists. No, you're wrong,' I say. 'She was only a girl.'... She was gone for some time. You were the only force that kept her from turning completely. That's magic. Perhaps the most powerful I've seen.' -In response to Felicity's love for Pippa keeping her from turning into a Winterland creature.

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

I’ve always been a dreamer, have always believed in the power of love and art and loud, life-affirming rock and roll, but, for the first time, I’m starting to have doubts. Can a dream even exist in reality? Or does it turn to stone the second it leaves your mind?

As you take steps to expand your awareness, you will naturally find yourself harnessing your mind's infinite power to create greater health, happiness, and love in your life.

I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. ... I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories - science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Love means the art of being with others. Meditation means the art of being with yourself. Both are two aspects of the same coin.

The power of intention manifests as an expression of expanding creativity, kindness, love, and beauty.

The life so brief, the art so long in the learning, the attempt so hard, the conquest so sharp, the fearful joy that ever slips away so quickly - by all this I mean love, which so sorely astounds my feeling with its wondrous operation, that when I think upon it I scarce know whether I wake or sleep.