Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Money isn’t just purchasing power here; it’s perception. Maugham’s “sixth sense” gag works because it flips a spiritual cliché into a materialist indictment: the extra faculty modern life demands isn’t intuition, it’s cash. Without it, the other senses still function, but they don’t fully count. You can see a painting, taste a meal, hear a concert, smell the sea, touch silk or skin, yet your access is partial, mediated, conditional. Money becomes the organ that turns sensation into participation.

The line is also a sly jab at the mythology of self-sufficiency. We like to pretend that experience is democratic, that beauty and pleasure float freely in the air. Maugham suggests the opposite: the world is arranged so that deprivation isn’t merely discomfort, it’s sensory impairment. Poverty doesn’t just limit choices; it edits reality, shrinking what you can notice, where you can go, who will let you in, what risks you can survive.

Context matters. Maugham wrote out of a Britain with rigid class stratification and a rapidly commercializing culture, where leisure and “refinement” were both status markers and commodities. As a playwright and novelist who moved between bohemia and high society, he understood how money lubricates not only transactions but credibility. The subtext is coldly observational rather than moralizing: if you want the full bandwidth of modern life, you need the extra sense that tells doors to open.