"At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely"
About this Quote
Maugham’s line lands like a polite toast with a hidden blade: the point of a dinner party isn’t excellence, it’s social ease. “Wisely but not too well” sounds like etiquette advice until you hear the jab at conspicuous refinement. Eating “too well” is a kind of performance, the gourmand’s equivalent of name-dropping - attention-seeking disguised as taste. Wisdom here means self-management: know your limits, don’t get sloppy, don’t turn pleasure into spectacle.
The second clause sharpens the knife. “Talk well but not too wisely” isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-domination. The person who talks “too wisely” turns conversation into a lecture and the table into an audience. Maugham, a playwright with a clinician’s ear for status games, understands that conversation at its best is choreography: timing, generosity, and the ability to make other people sound interesting. “Well” is social art; “wisely” is social power. Push the latter too hard and you expose the hierarchy everyone is pretending isn’t there.
The context matters: Maugham came up in a British culture where dinner parties were both recreation and sorting mechanism, especially across class lines. The quote reads as a survival guide for that world, but also a wry indictment of it. The ideal guest, in Maugham’s view, is neither glutton nor sage - just skilled enough to keep the evening weightless, and disciplined enough not to make their appetites (for food or for being right) everyone else’s problem.
The second clause sharpens the knife. “Talk well but not too wisely” isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-domination. The person who talks “too wisely” turns conversation into a lecture and the table into an audience. Maugham, a playwright with a clinician’s ear for status games, understands that conversation at its best is choreography: timing, generosity, and the ability to make other people sound interesting. “Well” is social art; “wisely” is social power. Push the latter too hard and you expose the hierarchy everyone is pretending isn’t there.
The context matters: Maugham came up in a British culture where dinner parties were both recreation and sorting mechanism, especially across class lines. The quote reads as a survival guide for that world, but also a wry indictment of it. The ideal guest, in Maugham’s view, is neither glutton nor sage - just skilled enough to keep the evening weightless, and disciplined enough not to make their appetites (for food or for being right) everyone else’s problem.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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