“A great deal of talent is lost in this world for want of a little courage.”
Flipping through a copy of Glamour magazine in my college dorm room, I saw the above quote and it stopped me. I pulled out a piece of yellow paper, copied it down, and stuffed it in my wallet along with my driver’s license and Social Security card, where it stayed until the edge wore to a soft fuzz and started to split along the fold lines.
Since then, every date book or calendar I’ve owned included that quote on the title page. It became my own personal slogan as I tried to figure out the rest of my life. Whenever I was faced with a choice between safe and risky, I tried to be brave and do the scary thing. That could also be because I am an Aries.
Before the internet, I never knew who said it. One friend suggested that it came from “The Wizard of Oz” but I was doubtful. Turns out it was some white British male, the kind who was able to make a living as a humorist/writer/preacher/blah, blah, blah back in the early 1800s. Sydney Smith’s life did not make a big impression on me, but his words shaped my life.
Turns out actor Jeff Goldblum has a credo that he lives by: a quote from British playwright (and anti-vaxxer) George Bernard Shaw, that he, too, has memorized.
He recited the passage, from Shaw’s play, Man and Superman, on a recent episode of Late Night with Stephen Colbert.
Once you hear it, you realize that Goldblum’s creative and seemingly inexhaustible artistic pursuits are a natural result of living by those words.
“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose considered by yourself as mighty, the being a force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish, little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community. And while I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work, the more I live. I cherish life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It's a sort of splendid torch that I've got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it off to future generations.”
In 1995, Aaron Sorkin wrote a movie entitled “The American President” and one of my teaching colleagues showed it every year. When you watch a film that many times, you gradually memorize the script and he used to come whistling into the lunch room, quoting from the fictional President Andrew Shepherd. At the moment he realizes he’s been bullied by his election opponent and, as a result, probabaly lost his girlfriend, and he wants to make it right. It’s terrific.
Sorkin also wrote and produced the liberal political fantasy, The West Wing, for many seasons and this past weekend, Sorkin and the cast of the show went to the White House for a 25th Anniversary celebration.
Martin Sheen, who played the fictional President Jed Bartlet, took to the podium and stunned the audience with a prayer from the Bengali poet and activist Rabindranath Tagore. It’s a rallying cry that we really need right now.
With only 42 days until the November election, we all need all the inspiration we can get.
What words inspire you? Share them in the comments. I’d love to hear.
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