Life's Pleasures Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

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.