Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham’s line lands with the dry finality of a diagnosis: human self-importance isn’t just wrong, it’s chronic. “Extraordinarily erroneous” is doing sly work. He’s not calling the mistake minor or accidental; he’s suggesting a grand, almost theatrical miscalculation, the kind that props up whole civilizations. And by pinning it on “men” rather than “people,” he keeps one foot in his era’s default language while also echoing his stage-trained interest in ego as a male-coded performance: status, mastery, significance.

The real sting is “position in nature.” It’s a demotion framed as realism. Nature isn’t a comforting backdrop; it’s an indifferent system where humans are just another animal improvising meaning. Maugham wrote in the long shadow of Darwin, and after the cultural humiliations of modernity had piled up: Freud shrinking the sovereign self, world wars revealing how thin the veneer of progress can be. Against that backdrop, the quote reads less like philosophy than like a playwright’s stage direction for the species: enter, confidently misread your role, refuse correction.

“Ineradicable” turns critique into fatalism. He’s not offering a reform program or a gentler self-image; he’s saying the delusion is adaptive. Believing we matter more than we do lubricates ambition, art, cruelty, tenderness, empire, charity. Strip it away and you don’t get enlightened humility; you get paralysis. The subtext is merciless: our finest stories about exceptionalism are also our most reliable coping mechanism, and the curtain never really drops on that particular act.