Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

A polite toast with a hidden blade: Maugham flatters marriage as an institution while quietly treating it as a personal vice. The first clause, “Marriage is a very good thing,” plays like dutiful bourgeois manners, the kind of sentence you say in a drawing room to avoid scandal. Then the hinge snaps: “but I think it’s a mistake to make a habit out of it.” The joke isn’t just that marriage can be monotonous; it’s that repetition is the real sin. He frames serial marriage less as romantic misfortune than as compulsive behavior, like smoking or gambling - respectable on occasion, ridiculous as routine.

The subtext is classic Maugham: civilization runs on conventions that he refuses to worship. “Habit” is the key word, smuggling in a broader skepticism about social scripts. Marriage, in his line, becomes something society wants you to do automatically, not thoughtfully. That’s the sting: he’s not attacking love so much as attacking the dead-eyed compliance that can pass for virtue.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Maugham moved through worlds where marriage was often less about intimacy than optics, inheritance, and social cover. As a gay man living under the long shadow of Victorian and Edwardian moral law, he had front-row seats to the way public respectability can demand private distortion. The wit lands because it’s not abstract: it’s a survival strategy dressed as a punchline. He gives you permission to admire the idea of marriage while refusing to let it colonize your life.