Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Perfection, Maugham suggests, is less an achievement than an aesthetic problem: a finished surface that leaves nothing for the audience to do. The line is mischievous in the way a good playwright is mischievous - it flatters our hunger for excellence, then undercuts it by implying that flawlessness can read as lifelessness. “Grave defect” is the sly twist: the very quality we’re trained to worship becomes a kind of deathliness, a polished tomb.

The intent is practical as much as philosophical. In theater, perfection is rarely the point; tension is. Drama runs on imbalance, on the tiny miscalculations and human lapses that force characters to improvise, reveal themselves, get caught. A “perfect” person is dramatically inert because they can’t be surprised, tempted, or undone. The audience can admire them, but admiration isn’t the same as attention. Maugham is defending the narrative value of friction: the off-note, the compromise, the vanity, the cheap little desire that makes a scene breathe.

The subtext also reads like a warning to artists and social climbers alike. The pursuit of polish - the impeccably curated self, the seamless script, the work sanded free of risk - can become a strategy for avoiding embarrassment. But embarrassment is where personality lives. Maugham, writing in an era that prized manners and well-made plays, understands how easily “correctness” turns into anesthesia. Dullness, here, isn’t boredom as a mood; it’s boredom as a moral and artistic failure: the refusal to let mess, contradiction, and appetite show.