Daily Inspiration Quote by Lucy Maud Montgomery

A sly survival tactic disguised as a genteel confession, Montgomery's line turns the usual moralizing around "be yourself" into a practical ethic: originality is not a virtue in the abstract; it is a resource to be spent where it can actually land. The sting is in "very careful" - shallowness here isn't laziness, it's labor. She is describing the social work of managing rooms where depth is treated like a nuisance and difference gets taxed as eccentricity, especially for women expected to be agreeable, legible, and politely small.

The subtext is an indictment of environments that claim to value intelligence while punishing it in practice. "Wasted" is the key word: it frames creativity as finite, something that can be squandered on audiences committed to misunderstanding you. That's not cynicism for its own sake; it's triage. The line suggests a split self: one Montgomery deploys for public consumption (conventional, frictionless), another protected for the private page, the intimate friendship, the work that will outlast a tea table.

Read in the context of an educator - and of a writer who built luminous interior lives while navigating rigid social codes - it also sounds like a pedagogy. Choose your battles. Not every space is designed for truth-telling, and insisting on depth everywhere can be a kind of self-sabotage. Montgomery offers a sharp, almost modern permission slip: perform normality when you must, but don't confuse that performance with who you are, or where your real thinking belongs.