Aging & Wisdom Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

A sly reversal sits at the center of Maugham's line: we flatter youth as the season of ambition, then quietly admit it is also the season of impatience. "Old age" here isn't pitched as decline but as a kind of moral reclassification. What once looked like weakness (slowness, caution, the narrowing of options) becomes a selective strength: the willingness to commit to projects whose payoff lives beyond the ego-rush of quick results.

The verb choice matters. Youth doesn't fail to do these things; it "shirked" them, a word that smuggles in avoidance and self-deception. Maugham isn't buying the romantic story that the young are simply too busy living. He's naming a psychological dodge: we call long-haul work impractical when it's really threatening. Time-intensive tasks require submission to process, to boredom, to uncertainty, to a future self you may not fully identify with yet.

As a playwright and novelist who specialized in cool-eyed social observation, Maugham understood the theater of self-justification. The subtext is that age brings not just experience but a changed relationship to time itself. When the runway shortens, paradoxically, the tolerance for "too long" can increase because the appetite for distraction fades. You're less interested in proving you're brilliant and more interested in finishing something true.

It's also a quietly unsettling thought: maturity isn't just growth; it's the moment you realize how much of your life was organized around dodging commitments that would have made you feel ordinary on the way to being good.