Wit & Attitude Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham slips the knife in with a smile: a line that sounds like a genial toast to conversation is really an indictment of action itself. “Foolishly” and “pleasantly” do the heavy lifting. He’s not scorning people for being shallow; he’s noting how easily charm, gossip, and small talk lubricate social life while the decisions people make - romantic, political, moral - tend to be clumsy, self-serving, or destructive. If that’s the ratio, he suggests, maybe the humane choice is to let humans stay in their soft, verbal element and keep their hands off the controls.

The subtext is distinctly Maugham: a cosmopolitan skeptic’s mistrust of grand gestures. As a playwright and novelist who watched ego, desire, and status anxieties play out in drawing rooms and colonial outposts, he understood that “doing” often means imposing your will on others. Talk, by contrast, can be performative and empty, but it’s also low-impact. It lets vanity vent without spilling blood. The joke is that prattle, usually treated as frivolous, becomes an accidental virtue when set against the havoc of earnest action.

Context matters: Maugham’s career spans the era of world wars and the brittle confidence of late empire. In that shadow, the line reads less like misanthropy than a defense mechanism - a preference for irony over ideology, conversation over crusade. It’s a warning dressed as a quip: when people are most convinced they’re “doing something,” everyone else should check the exit signs.