In this paper we study sharp pointwise inequalities for maximal operators. In particular, we strengthen DeVore’s inequality for the moduli of smoothness and a logarithmic variant of Bennett–DeVore–Sharpley’s inequality for rearrangements. As a consequence, we improve the classical Stein–Zygmund embedding deriving
B
˙
∞
d
/
p
L
p
,
∞
(
R
d
)
↪
BMO
(
R
d
)
\dot {B}^{d/p}_\infty L_{p,\infty }(\mathbb {R}^d) \hookrightarrow \text {BMO}(\mathbb {R}^d)
for
1
>
p
>
∞
1 > p > \infty
. Moreover, these results are also applied to establish new Fefferman–Stein inequalities, Calderón–Scott type inequalities, and extrapolation estimates. Our approach is based on the limiting interpolation techniques.