Life & Wisdom Quote by Florida Scott-Maxwell

Florida Scott-Maxwell smuggles a dare into what sounds like a benediction. The first clause refuses the usual self-help certainty: being yourself is not automatically rewarding, not always “worth the trouble.” Trouble is the point. It implies friction with family scripts, gender roles, class expectations, the tidy narratives that make other people comfortable. By conceding the cost upfront, she makes the line feel earned rather than inspirational wallpaper.

Then she pivots: “but we do know.” That small note of collective certainty replaces personal doubt with moral clarity. Scott-Maxwell isn’t promising selfhood will pay off in applause or inner peace; she’s arguing it’s an obligation. Calling it a “sacred duty” yokes authenticity to ethics. It’s not about self-expression as lifestyle branding, but about refusing a kind of quiet fraud that corrodes a life from the inside. Sacred, here, reads less as religious than as non-negotiable: something you owe to your own limited time.

The context matters. Scott-Maxwell wrote as a woman who came into her most celebrated work later in life, after decades of compromise, caretaking, and social constraint. That history charges the sentence with realism: she knows how easily the self gets bartered away in exchange for safety, approval, or usefulness. The subtext is almost political: when you abandon your own contours, you become easier to manage. Her line insists that selfhood is labor and resistance, not a vibe.