Aging & Wisdom Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Youth, in Maugham's line, isn’t innocence so much as entitlement with good lighting. “Take” is the operative verb: kindness becomes something you collect, not something someone risks offering. The quote works because it refuses the sentimental version of being young (all openness and possibility) and replaces it with a colder psychological truth: when you haven’t yet been humbled by loss, illness, disappointment, or your own bad decisions, other people’s generosity feels like the natural order of things.

Maugham was a playwright with a surgeon’s eye for social performance, especially among the comfortable classes who treat manners as both lubricant and weapon. In that world, “kindness” often arrives wrapped in status: attention, introductions, forgiveness, second chances. A young person, buoyed by novelty and cultural capital, reads that as deserved. The subtext is not that the young are malicious; it’s that they’re unacquainted with contingency. They haven’t had enough doors shut to understand that every open one was opened by someone.

The sting of the sentence is its delayed moral accounting. Age doesn’t magically make you better; it makes you aware. You learn kindness is voluntary, finite, and sometimes costly. You learn it can be withdrawn. You learn how easily it can be confused with flattery, desire, or obligation. Maugham’s intent is a small, sharp correction to the youthful myth of merit: what felt like a birthright was often a gift, and gifts create a debt the young don’t know they’re incurring until the bill arrives.