“We are all such a waste of our potential, like three-way lamps using one-way bulbs.”

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

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Do you have more details about the quote "We are all such a waste of our potential, like three-way lamps using one-way bulbs." by Mignon McLaughlin?

Mignon McLaughlin278

American journalist 1913–1983

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“Our wasted oil unprofitably burns,
Like hidden lamps in old sepulchral urns.”

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Source: Conversation (1782), Line 357.

“Are we wasting our lives? By that word “wasting” we mean dissipating our energy in various ways, dissipating it in specialized professions.”

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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.

“One man's ways may be as good as another's, but we all like our own best.”

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“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.”

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Compare: "You can never plan the future by the past", Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, Vol. iv. p. 55.
1770s, "Give me liberty, or give me death!" (1775)

“Politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination.”

Andrew Lang (1844–1912) Scots poet, novelist and literary critic

1910 Speech, quoted in Alan L. Mackay The Harvest of a Quiet Eye (1977), as reported in Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (2005), p. 488.
Widely attributed to Lang (e.g. in Elizabeth M. Knowles, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Oxford University Press; and in Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, Columbia University Press).
Variant: He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts—for support rather than illumination.