Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

A boosterish call to national self-improvement sounds almost suspicious coming from W. Somerset Maugham, a playwright better known for cool-eyed portraits of ambition, moral compromise, and the small hypocrisies people dress up as principle. That tension is the point: the language is all civic muscle and collective uplift, but it also performs a kind of aspirational theater.

The verb chain is doing the heavy lifting. "Develop", "call forth", "build up", "promote" - each one escalates the sense of purposeful motion, like a montage in a propaganda reel. It’s not intimate persuasion; it’s stagecraft. Maugham, trained to hear how rhetoric lands in a room, writes a sentence designed for applause: broad nouns ("resources", "institutions", "interests") that let every listener insert their own agenda without friction. The phrase "our day and generation" flatters the audience with historical importance while sidestepping specifics that might divide them.

The subtext is a wager about legacy. "Something worthy to be remembered" is a moral bribe, offering immortality in exchange for labor and buy-in. It’s also a subtle admission of anxiety: remembrance isn’t guaranteed, so the rhetoric manufactures urgency and meaning. In a period marked by empire, modernization, and the churn of social change, this kind of civic imperative doubles as reassurance: if we keep building, we won’t have to stare too hard at what’s failing, fading, or unjust.

Spoken by a dramatist, the line reads as both exhortation and critique - a reminder that "great interests" can be public-spirited or self-serving, depending on who gets to define them.