I set down in my notebooks, not once or twice, but in a dozen places, the facts I had seen. I knew that suffering did not ennoble; it degraded. It made men selfish, mean, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things. It did not make them more than men; it made them less than men.

W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) English novelist and playwright [William Somerset Maugham]

The Summing Up, ch. 19 (1938)
    (Source)

On his experiences as a medical student and the patients he observed.