Daily Inspiration Quote by Adrienne Clarkson

“Horizon” is a slyly optimistic word here: not a finish line but a direction of travel. Clarkson frames “the creation of a noble society” as a long project you can’t personally complete, which is precisely the point. By reaching for the medieval cathedral builder, she borrows an ethic of generational labor: people carving single stones for a structure they may never see finished, and may not even be credited for. That image flatters the listener, but it also disciplines them. Your role isn’t to demand the whole cathedral now; it’s to do work sturdy enough to hold other people’s work later.

The intent is civic motivation without the cheap sugar of instant transformation. “You will have added your conception” elevates participation beyond volunteering-as-virtue; it’s about authorship, imagination, and craft. “Artful piece of stone” makes contribution feel tangible and exacting. Artful implies skill, taste, and responsibility: a badly cut stone endangers the arch. The subtext: citizenship is not just opinion or outrage; it’s competence applied to the common good.

Context matters because Clarkson’s public life sits at the intersection of media, nationhood, and institutional legitimacy (notably as Canada’s Governor General). In a time when politics is often consumed as spectacle and individuals are encouraged to see themselves as brands, she offers an older, sturdier counter-myth: anonymity with purpose. It’s also a quiet rebuke to cynicism. Cathedrals were acts of faith; Clarkson repurposes that faith toward pluralistic democracy, inviting people to build anyway, even when the “noble society” feels distant as the horizon.