“You yourself may not be luminous, but you are a conductor of light.”
Source: Paris France (1940), p. 56
The Ad-dressing of Cats
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)
"An introverted call to action: Susan Cain at TED2012," TED, February 28, 2012.
Source: 1980s, That Benediction is Where You Are (1985), p. 63
Context: Are we wasting our lives? By that word “wasting” we mean dissipating our energy in various ways, dissipating it in specialized professions. Are we wasting our whole existence, our life? If you are rich, you may say, “Yes, I have accumulated a lot of money, it has been a great pleasure.” Or if you have a certain talent, that talent is a danger to a religious life. Talent is a gift, a faculty, an aptitude in a particular direction, which is specialization. Specialization is a fragmentary process. So you must ask yourself whether you are wasting your life. You may be rich, you may have all kinds of faculties, you may be a specialist, a great scientist or a businessman, but at the end of your life has all that been a waste? All the travail, all the sorrow, all the tremendous anxiety, insecurity, the foolish illusions that man has collected, all his gods, all his saints and so on — have all that been a waste? You may have power, position, but at the end of it — what? Please, this is a serious question that you must ask yourself. Another cannot answer this question for you.
Letter to Lord Newton (25 July 1911), quoted in The Times (26 July 1911), p. 8
Leader of the Opposition
On the power of art in “Lucy Liu on making art to find a sense of belonging” https://www.cnn.com/style/article/lucy-liu-artsy/index.html in CNN (2019 Nov 28)
“Some of the words you'll find within yourself,
the rest some power will inspire you to say.”
III. 26–27 (tr. Robert Fagles); Athena to Telemachus.
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)
