Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham’s line is a tidy provocation dressed up as a toast: two “good things,” and he’s done counting. The blunt arithmetic is the point. By narrowing life’s bounty to freedom of thought and freedom of action, he’s not being naïvely idealistic; he’s smuggling in a rebuke to every polite society that congratulates itself on “freedom” while policing the mind and choreographing behavior.

As a playwright and a novelist who made a career out of watching people bargain with their own desires, Maugham understood how often the prison is internal. “Freedom of thought” isn’t just permission to hold opinions; it’s the private right to want the wrong thing, to doubt the approved story, to admit unflattering motives. “Freedom of action” then tests whether that interior liberty is real or merely decorative. The pairing is surgical: thought without action is a salon hobby; action without thought is impulse or obedience. He implies that most lives are crippled by the separation.

The subtext also carries Maugham’s cool cynicism about the usual substitutes for freedom: comfort, respectability, romance, even success. Those can be bargains struck with the world, but they come with terms and conditions. Freedom, in his framing, is the only non-negotiable good because it’s the precondition for any authentic choice, including the choice to be conventional.

In a 20th-century context of rigid class codes, moral surveillance, and political shocks, the line reads less like self-help and more like a minimalist manifesto: if you can think for yourself and live accordingly, you’ve already beaten the system.