Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Permission, in Maugham's world, is never granted by society; it is taken, invoice attached. "You can do anything" reads like a liberation slogan until the second clause snaps shut like a trap: "if you are prepared to take the consequences". The line isn’t motivational poster talk. It’s a moral ledger. Freedom exists, Maugham suggests, but it’s the kind you pay for up front, in reputation, comfort, love, or belonging.

As a playwright and chronicler of cosmopolitan desire, Maugham understood how people reinvent themselves by crossing lines they pretend to honor. His characters often want the thrill of transgression without the social bill: the scandal, the exile, the loneliness after the affair, the quiet contempt that replaces applause. The quote targets that cowardice. It dismantles the favorite alibi of the modern subject: that choices are personal, consequences optional, and judgment unfair. Maugham’s point is colder: the world is permissive in the way a courtroom is permissive. You may act, but you will be answered.

The subtext is less about ethics than about adulthood. Consequences are not only punishment; they’re the reality of causality, the thing that turns "I feel" into "I did". Maugham’s dry conditional clause functions like a stage direction: go ahead, make the bold entrance - but don’t complain when the plot arrives. In an era obsessed with respectability and quietly marinated in hypocrisy, it’s a neat scalpel: not puritanical, just unsentimental about what desire costs when it collides with other people’s rules.