Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles de Lint

De Lint slips a small blade into a culture that romanticizes conflict: the line reads like a blessing, but it’s also a rebuke. “Remember” isn’t passive nostalgia; it’s a directive to practice attention in a world engineered for amnesia. And “quiet wonders” isn’t just pretty scenery. It’s the overlooked infrastructure of meaning - the small mercies, local magic, fleeting intimacies, the kind of beauty that doesn’t trend because it doesn’t shout. He’s arguing that what keeps a life (and a society) livable is usually what gets edited out of the heroic narrative.

The second sentence weaponizes a comparison we’re trained to accept. “Warriors” are the default symbol of necessity: protection, bravery, sacrifice. De Lint doesn’t deny their existence; he demotes them. The phrasing “more need of them than it has for warriors” turns the moral ledger upside down, implying that our constant readiness for battle - literal or cultural - is not just exhausting but overfunded. In a moment when public life rewards outrage, posturing, and perpetual emergency, he suggests the radical alternative is not softness as surrender, but softness as strategy.

Context matters: de Lint is a fantasy writer whose work often treats the everyday as a portal and community as a form of enchantment. That background helps explain the quote’s real aim. It’s not escapism. It’s a political theology of the mundane: if you can be taught to notice wonder, you can be taught to resist the idea that the world is only saved by force.