Happiness Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham takes a cherished moral cliche -- the idea that pain turns people into saints -- and treats it with the cold skepticism of someone who has watched too many drawing-room tragedies end in smallness rather than grandeur. The sentence is built like a trap: first he denies the comforting doctrine outright, then he offers a sly correction ("happiness does that sometimes") that feels almost scandalous in its cheerfulness, and finally he lands the real punch line: suffering more often produces pettiness and revenge.

The intent is not to argue that suffering is meaningless, but to puncture the sentimental economics of virtue, the popular belief that misery automatically pays dividends in wisdom. Maugham's subtext is sharper: when people praise suffering as character-building, they're often laundering cruelty into something noble, giving social and personal hardship a halo so nobody has to fix it. If pain makes you "better", then the world that causes pain can remain untouched.

Context matters. As a playwright and novelist of the late Victorian and early modern period, Maugham lived amid tight social hierarchies, colonial reach, and the moral posturing of polite society. His work is full of characters who turn disappointment into a personality: resentments calcified into etiquette, moral judgments used as weapons. "Petty and vindictive" is not abstract psychology; it's social observation. The line also carries a modern edge: happiness "sometimes" ennobles because generosity and patience are easier when you're not in survival mode. Maugham isn't romanticizing comfort; he's insisting that virtue is less a mystical byproduct of pain than a fragile practice shaped by conditions.