Love & Passion Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham reduces the lofty ideal of marriage to a mixture of convenience and avoidance. A man seeks a home, a stable center, but equally seeks relief from the nuisances that sexual desire entails outside wedlock: the chase, the negotiations of romance, the costs of discretion, the risks of scandal. The joke bites because it flattens eros into a bother and recasts matrimony as an institution designed to regulate it, not exalt it. Desire is not the star but the problem to be solved; the household becomes a fortress of respectability where passion is made private, predictable, and thereby less troublesome.

The phrasing all that sort of thing is classic British understatement. It deflates erotic drama into a category of petty inconveniences, and the throwaway tone sharpens the satire. Maugham, a keen anatomist of middle-class manners, often showed marriage as a pragmatic contract rather than a romantic apotheosis. Writing in the long shadow of Victorian prudery and the newer frankness of the early twentieth century, he skewers the bourgeois male fantasy: settle down, gain social legitimacy, outsource domestic labor, and stop worrying about temptation and its consequences. The line sits comfortably alongside the epigrammatic traditions of Wilde and Shaw, but its cynicism is more weary than flamboyant.

There is also a quiet indictment of gender roles. Home implies a woman who will maintain it, and the male wish not to be bothered assumes her accommodation. Sex becomes a domestic duty folded into housekeeping, a management problem resolved by marriage. Maugham suggests that the institutional solution that promises tranquility often breeds another kind of discontent. When sex is tamed into routine, the restlessness it sought to quell may reappear as boredom, hypocrisy, or betrayal. His fiction repeatedly follows that logic: the characters who marry to escape the entanglements of desire discover new entanglements born of the tidy arrangements they thought would free them.