Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham’s line doesn’t just demystify romance; it prosecutes it. Calling love a “dirty trick” drags the concept out of candlelight and into the back alley where motives are suspect and nobody’s hands are clean. The phrase is brilliantly calibrated: “only” shrinks love to a single function, “dirty” injects moral disgust, and “played on us” frames the human heart as a mark in a con. It’s not that love feels fake; it’s that love may be the most effective fraud precisely because it feels profound.

The intent is classic Maugham: cool-eyed, amused, and faintly contemptuous of the stories people tell themselves to make desire sound noble. As a playwright who watched respectable society perform virtue while pursuing appetite, Maugham understood romance as theater - and theater as a machine for revealing self-deception. The subtext isn’t anti-sex so much as anti-sentimentality. He’s puncturing the Victorian hangover that treats passion as fate, insisting instead on biology’s blunt little agenda: reproduce, repeat.

Context matters. Writing in an era when Freud and early evolutionary thinking were reshaping how art and society talked about instinct, Maugham’s cynicism reads less like nihilism than like a hard modernist correction. The line also has a defensive edge: if love is a trick, then getting hurt is not failure but inevitability. It turns private heartbreak into a universal swindle, giving the wounded ego something it craves - an explanation that sounds like wisdom.