Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham delivers the complaint like a shrug you can hear: a dry, almost conversational line that pretends to be a simple observation while quietly accusing the world of rigging the game. The phrase "An unfortunate thing" is doing sly work. It sounds modest, even polite, but it frames moral struggle as an unfair feature of the universe, not merely a personal failure. That shift matters: it lets the speaker confess weakness without begging forgiveness.

The sentence pivots on a neat asymmetry: good habits require maintenance, bad habits require only permission. "Easier to give up" implies good behavior is a kind of ongoing tenancy - stop paying attention and you're evicted. Bad ones, by contrast, have squatters' rights. Maugham doesn't romanticize vice; he portrays it as convenient, available, and therefore culturally sticky. The subtext is less "people are bad" than "people are tired". Virtue asks for energy; indulgence asks for surrender.

As a playwright, Maugham understood how self-knowledge lands best when it's sharpened into a line an audience can carry home. This is stage-worthy cynicism: compact, quotable, and just bitter enough to feel true. Written out of a period obsessed with respectability and discipline, it reads like a small rebellion against moral posturing. It's not an excuse so much as a diagnosis: our worst patterns flourish because they fit effortlessly into daily life, while our best selves require deliberate, repeated choice.