Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

A playwright admitting he learned the simplest line only in old age is Maugham at his most quietly barbed: the confession doubles as an indictment. "I don't know" is four words, but in Maugham's world of drawing rooms, doctors, and colonial outposts, ignorance isn’t neutral - it’s socially expensive. The late discovery implies a lifetime spent performing certainty because the culture demanded it. That’s stagecraft, and it’s also survival.

The intent isn’t to romanticize humility; it’s to expose how ego and etiquette conspire against honesty. Maugham wrote characters who posture as worldly, moral, or sophisticated, then unravel under pressure. Here, he makes that pressure explicit: not knowing is rarely the problem. Admitting it is. The line lands because it flips the expected arc. We imagine wisdom as accumulating answers; Maugham frames wisdom as acquiring permission to stop pretending.

The subtext carries a professional sting. Playwrights trade in dialogue that sounds inevitable, confident, clean. Real life is messier, full of half-knowledge and improvisation. "Easy" reads as self-mockery: if it was so easy, why did it take decades? Because status runs on the performance of knowing - in art, in class life, in love. Maugham’s era prized the authoritative man; his work often punctured that ideal. This sentence is a late, elegant pinprick: the bravest line is sometimes the one that refuses to act.