Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham’s line lands like a compliment to morality, then quietly pickpockets it. “The most useful thing” sounds like praise, but the usefulness he’s naming isn’t ethical guidance; it’s how easily a principle can be liquidated when circumstances get inconvenient. The sentence is engineered to reveal hypocrisy without sermonizing. He doesn’t argue that people abandon principles. He assumes it, then dryly upgrades that abandonment into the principle’s defining feature.

The subtext is theatrical in the best Maugham way: a backstage view of public virtue. Principles function as props - polished enough for the audience, lightweight enough to drop when the plot demands a quick rewrite. “Sacrificed” is especially barbed. Sacrifice is supposed to be noble, a cost paid for something higher. Here it’s inverted: the “higher” thing is expediency, the low god of deadlines, reputations, profits, and fear. Maugham implies that modern life doesn’t eliminate morality; it repurposes it into a currency you spend to buy flexibility.

Context matters. Writing across the late Victorian era into two world wars, Maugham watched institutions preach rectitude while improvising policy, empire, and personal loyalty on the fly. As a playwright, he understood that audiences love a character with principles right up until those principles slow the action. The line doesn’t flatter cynicism so much as indict the social arrangement that rewards it: in a world that prizes results, the “use” of principles is often their disposability.