Have you seen the movie The Razor’s Edge? I highly recommend it. It’s one of those movies that I liked so much that I read the book after seeing the movie, because I didn’t want to miss a single good line. This has happened a few times, where the movie impressed me so much that I wanted to read the book in full. The Razor’s Edge, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Fight Club to name a few. In case of The Big Lebowski, I liked it so much that I downloaded its screenplay and read every single dialogue a number of times. Anyways, today, I want to share some excerpts from the book/novel The Razor’s Edge by William Somerset Maugham.

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.

For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in.

The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.

In other words, truth is not a popularity contest. Truth remains, even if zero people believe in it.

Almost all the people who’ve had the most effect on me I seem to have met by chance.

Wouldn’t it be better to follow the beaten track and let what’s coming to you come?” And then you think of a fellow who an hour before was full of life and fun,and he’s lying dead; it’s all so cruel and meaningless. It’s hard not to ask yourself what life is all about and whether there’s any sense to it or whether it’s all a tragic blunder of blind fate

You see, money to you means freedom; to me it means bondage.

A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.

When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself?

He taught that it is not essential to salvation to retire from the world, but only to renounce the self. He taught that work done with no selfish interest purifies the mind and that duties are opportunities afforded to man to sink his separate self and become one with the universal self.

The best I can suggest is that when the Absolute manifested itself in the world evil was the natural correlation of good. You could never have had the stupendous beauty of the Himalayas without the unimaginable horror of a convulsion of the earth’s crust. The Chinese craftsman who makes a vase in what they call eggshell porcelain can give it a lovely shape, ornament it with a beautiful design, stain it a ravishing colour and give it a perfect glaze, but from its very nature he can’t make it anything but fragile. If you drop in on the floor it will break into a dozen fragments. Isn’t possible in the same way that the values we cherish in the world can only exist in combination with evil?

Did Beethoven create his symphonies for his glorification? I don’t believe it. I believe he created them because the music in his soul demanded expression and then all he tried to do was to make them as perfect as he knew how.

It made me sad to think how silly, useless, and trivial his life had been. It mattered very little now that he had gone to so many parties and had hobnobbed with all those princes, dukes, and counts. They had forgotten him already.