Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham’s line lands with the clipped certainty of a man who’s already been accused of selfishness and decided to make the indictment sound like wisdom. On its face, it’s a paean to delegation: why waste your finite hours on chores when money can buy you time? But the phrasing tilts it into something sharper. “Made up my mind long ago” reads like a preemptive defense, a verdict delivered before the jury even sits. He isn’t confessing; he’s establishing policy.

The subtext is class, clean and unapologetic. The sentence assumes an “others” whose labor is perpetually available, and a “pay” that makes the moral math feel settled. Maugham doesn’t pretend there’s nobility in self-sufficiency; he frames it as a sentimental hobby for people without options. That’s where the wit sits: he treats the supposedly virtuous act of doing things for yourself as a bad bargain, a squandering of the only truly scarce resource.

Context matters. Maugham was not merely a playwright but a professional observer of human transactions - social, romantic, colonial, financial. His work often dissects the polite stories people tell themselves to make desire and advantage sound respectable. This quote performs the same trick in miniature. It’s hedonism dressed as efficiency, privilege reframed as practical philosophy.

What makes it work is its candor. It doesn’t ask to be admired for generosity or grit. It asks to be admired for clarity: if life is short, then outsource the drudgery and spend the saved hours on whatever you can’t hire out - attention, taste, appetite, the messy business of being alive.